Back inside the hotel, Dan waited for Cassie to return but she didn’t. Just before midnight, Andrew and Graham left with the three girls, walking in a ragged row abreast the road, towards Graham’s house. Dan watched them go. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t spy on Graham.
Alone now, he pushed himself away from the side of the hotel and began walking back towards the dump, towards home. He took a detour past the Rotary Park, its playground of derelict farm machinery made weird by the booze and the night, and then past Cassie’s house.
Her lights were off. It was quiet. He hoped she was in bed, by herself. From here, the slag heap rising up behind him, he could see to the margins of town, where the blackness began, the lights of a road train breaching the hill on the town’s southern edge. Beyond it, and on all sides, were hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of clapped-out mulga.
But Graham was right. There was a life to be lived here. Right here. It wasn’t the edge of the world. That was somewhere further east or north, perhaps out near Fowler’s station, he wasn’t sure.
The Smell of Touch
How had he become so goddamn old? William Moore lowered himself down the steps at the front of his house. Where the hell was Maggie, and what was he doing out here anyway? He squinted across the road. He could make out the dark pines of the war memorial park opposite and, beyond that, the postcard blue of the Southern Ocean. Ah, that’s right. The soap girl. Where was she?
Soap was one of their few indulgences. They lived a quiet life, listening to Radio National in the mornings, taking lunch under the grape-laden pergola in their backyard, a walk in the late afternoon on the headland. Below, the ocean, swelling incessantly.
Laura, the twenty-something granddaughter of one of Maggie’s friends, had been supplying them with soap for the last three years. She and her husband, a tall, wiry man with hair that lay flat against his back in large knotted clumps, had a small property on the outskirts of town where they grew vegetables, kept chooks and made soap. Once a fortnight, Laura would do the rounds on her bike, stopping off at William and Maggie’s house with a bar of soap and a carton of eggs. A quick chat and she’d be gone, onto her next customer.
Maggie was probably with Laura’s grandmother right now.
‘If I hit that leaf it means I’ve saved us from the Japs,’ said Maggie to Billy as she lay prone on the dirt in his backyard, sighting along the barrel of her Daisy rifle through a gap in his mother’s rosemary hedge.
Billy Moore kept his eye on the leaf – the tiny one sticking out by itself near the base of the oleander. The one he’d just missed. His mum was always telling him to stay away from that bush, and about the stockman who’d stirred his soup with an oleander branch and died a terrible, purple-faced death.
Maggie’s leg pressed against Billy’s. Eleven years old and she was already a crack shot. She held her breath and Billy heard the click and faint schoock of the air-powered gun as the leaf oscillated briefly and then was still, now with a tiny hole in its centre. Maggie looked at him and grinned.
It was 1942. At the top of Spencer Gulf, locked by sea on one side and the desert on the other stood Port Augusta, a town of six thousand. Its children roamed the streets at will, their parents huddled around radios three times a day to listen to the news. They seemed to talk of little else but The Hun and The Nip Bastards, especially since the fall of Singapore. Maggie had an image in her mind of a race of small, yellow, dark-haired men, all exactly the same, massing to the north.
The two children had spent much of the summer in backyards and vacant lots, shooting The Hun on some dusty road in France or doing the same to The Nips in the viny, snake-infested jungles of New Guinea.
Maggie rolled away from Billy, spat a rosemary needle out of her mouth and sat in the dirt, the gun pointing over her shoulder to the blue.
‘Okay,’ conceded Billy. ‘You win. What now?’
Maggie shrugged her shoulders. ‘Dunno. What about lemons?’
Every house on the hill had a lemon tree but Billy knew she meant the one belonging to old Mrs Patterson and her ugly daughter, Gertrude. That tree sat in the middle of the Patterson’s backyard, in full view of their kitchen window, but with enough cover on either side – the brick toilet block, a water tank, an untidy clump of hibiscus – to make stealing them a delicious possibility.
Billy grinned. ‘Why not.’
When Constable Johnston had finished all his paperwork he scrubbed the floor of the cell with water and carbolic soap, the image of O’Reilly, on all fours, still working its unwanted way into his mind after all these months. He’d had to hit the lawyer twice to the side of his head to get him off the girl. He locked up and set off for home.
Over the bridge and up the hill to his little cottage with its view of the mangrove-bound port. Maggie, his niece, would be somewhere close, playing with Billy from across the road. O’Reilly would probably be in his backyard, pissing on his lemon tree. Johnston lengthened his stride.
Quickly up the steps to his veranda, he knocked the dust off his boots. No Sunshine. Something was wrong.
He opened the screen door and moved quickly through the house, glancing into each of the four rooms that came off the central hallway. Then into the back room and he could hear Sunshine whining now, and out into the backyard, Archie on the ground, eyes closed, his heavy chair with its metal axle overturned on the ground beside him.
‘Archie,’ he said and crouched down beside his brother.
‘I’m okay,’ said Archie and opened his eyes and Johnston could see they were shot with blood, brimming with tears. ‘Just having a rest, mate.’
Johnston righted the wheelchair. Sunshine dropped slowly to his belly and edged forward, nuzzling Archie. ‘I was just about to get up and make myself a cuppa,’ said Archie. Johnston shooed Sunshine away, clutched his brother under his armpits and lifted him slowly into his chair.
William and Maggie arrived in Darwin in December 1965, in the crazy time between the Build Up and The Wet. The skies were black with massive anvil-clouds and the air sparked and fizzed with lightning. South Australia was another country and it quickly faded from their thoughts as they established themselves in Darwin society.
They were invited to parties overlooking the harbour and in the leafy, hilly parts of Ludmilla, in houses with plantation shutters and floors polished until you could see your face in them. The places where the doctors, lawyers, judges, newspaper proprietors, pearl dealers and other captains of commerce lived, and where the men all introduced themselves by surname first, conscious of their defining roles in the drama of this odd little city, closer to Jakarta than to Brisbane.
The city’s only veterinarians, William and Maggie worked hard, treating everything from cats to crocodiles. When William was offered a government contract to control camp dogs in Aboriginal communities in the western Northern Territory, he jumped at the chance. Once a month, they would fly in to visit these remote cattle station and mission communities. From the air their shacks appeared as twenty or thirty tiny rectangles of iron amid vast expanses of black-soil plain and Mitchell Grass.
When the locals saw that William wasn’t there to shoot all their dogs on sight, they welcomed the young couple. They set up clinics and injected the dogs with vitamins and antibiotics to treat their mange and scabies. The dogs became healthier and, with them, the Aboriginal children they lived alongside.
With their four weeks’ holiday each year, William and Maggie made for the most remote parts of the western Northern Territory, revelling in its vastness and space. They explored the West Baines River to its source in the craggy limestone scree of Mt Behn, the Tanami Desert, the natural galleries of Aboriginal art that ran for mile after mile beneath the overhang of the Newcastle Range.
Once William caught a barramundi so large that when it struck he thought he’d hooked a freshwater crocodile. That evening they took it back to Amanbidji and shared the feast with the traditional owners of the vast floodplain stretching to the west and n
orth. On the ground outside a hut that was a jumble of cast-off pieces of iron and timber they played cards well into the evening.
On another trip William and Maggie were called on to treat a young Aboriginal man with sutures and antibiotics after he’d been speared in the thigh as payback for running over his nephew one moon-less night.
These things burned brightly for William. Massive suns of memory, their light travelling undaunted through the darkness to reach him. What happened yesterday, last month, last year, were meteoric flashes in comparison, burning themselves out in an instant.
William shuffled down the path to the letterbox and lifted the lid. No mail. He studied the sign beside their rosemary hedge. House for sale. Their house. Their home. They would have to leave their home? But he’d known that, hadn’t he? Of course. They’d go back to Adelaide to live, where they’d be closer to … closer to something or someone, he wasn’t sure.
How had he become so goddamn old? Above him, a Black-shouldered Kite wheeled in the blue and another memory flooded his mind.
At the end of one of their holidays they had given two old Aboriginal women, sisters, a lift from Amanbidji to Yarralin. When they reached the tiny community, on the edge of the massive Victoria River Downs Station, they helped the old women out with their swags and pannikins. A young man ambled over from the nearest house to help. Mary, one of the sisters, clasped his face with her thin black fingers and wailed. He was from Mistake Creek and she hadn’t seen him since he was a boy. He picked up her swag and swung it easily onto his broad shoulders and walked over to the sisters’ house.
‘Oh, poor bugger,’ said Mary to her sister. ‘Look at him.’
‘Poor bugger,’ said her sister, softly.
William and Maggie had heard this before. It was often how older Aboriginal women spoke on seeing young men and women they’d known only as children. Those who’d grown up since the last time they’d seen them. But why ‘poor bugger’? The man was in the prime of his life. William and Mary had puzzled over it on their way back to Darwin.
Maggie and Billy dumped all bar two of the stolen lemons into an old crate on Billy’s back veranda, covered them up with newspaper and kept going, into town, just in case the old bag had seen them and had a mind to visit and make trouble.
On the other side of the inlet they slid halfway down the embankment and scrambled around until they were underneath the bridge, its maze of thick timbers and blackened iron directly above them. This was a beaut place. Below them and twenty yards away, at the bottom of the embankment, sat the dark water. They could steal away from adults and lose themselves here in daydreams and the smell of mud.
Billy yanked his lemon out of one of his pockets, his pocket knife from the other. He opened the blade and sliced the fruit into rough quarters. He gave one to Maggie and they took turns pulling faces at each other as they sucked. Even stolen, it was tart.‘What’ll happen to you and your dad?’ asked Billy, in between grimaces.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know. If your uncle has to go away to the war,’ he said, licking the juice carefully off the blade of his knife and wiping it dry on his shorts. ‘I mean, who’ll look after you?’
Maggie studied a graze on her knee. She squeezed the lemon and the juice dripped and bit into the wound.
‘He won’t go away,’ said Maggie, sounding braver than she was, and tossed the shuddery lemon into the water and picked up her rifle. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, and ran down the embankment towards the water, veering away from its edge as she ran.
Billy caught up with her after a while and she slowed down to a walk as they entered the main street of Port Augusta. From the wharves they could hear the sound of men hitting things with hammers.
‘My turn with the gun,’ said Billy, and Maggie walked another obstinate twenty paces before unshouldering the rifle and passing it to him.
Past the post office they walked, the school behind looming as an ironclad reminder that this was Sunday, and Sunday afternoon at that. Maggie tried not to think of her teacher, Mrs O’Reilly.
Later, Maggie lay in the grass at the end of her backyard, half hidden by a clump of rosemary at the edge of O’Reilly’s patch of lawn, ten feet from the lawyer’s lemon tree. ‘The Ambidexter’ as her father and uncle called him. She didn’t know what it meant, but it didn’t sound good, at least not the way her uncle said it. She knew something bad had happened. Her father and uncle sometimes stopped talking when she entered a room.
The evening was warm and she lay there, tired of imagining enemies. O’Reilly’s axe sat wedged into the chopping block by his back door, its handle pointing stiffly at her.
It startled her when he emerged from his house, striding towards the tree.
When O’Reilly’s step faltered, Maggie knew he’d seen her, but he kept on, stopped by the tree, unzipped himself and stood there, urinating. Maggie kept her eyes on the ground until she could no longer hear the tinkle of piss, but when she looked up he hadn’t moved and she saw his cock half hidden by the darkness between his legs and she turned away, rolled over and ran back through the yard.
And now, at last, William understood. The old women were sad for the young, whose lives were spiralling out behind them – the gyrations of character, personality and missed opportunity growing ever wider – without them even knowing it. Just as their own lives had done. That man-child at Yarralin, in his mid twenties but already with one foot in the grave, hurtling towards old age. ‘Poor bugger.’
‘Yes!’ he said. He felt a rush like he’d solved one of the mysteries of life. He must tell Maggie when she got back from her farewells.
‘Hello William.’
Startled, he turned. It was Laura, the soap girl. Her pale prettiness was disarranged by the bucket hat she wore in place of a helmet.
‘Hello Laura,’ he said. ‘What have you got for us?’
She leant her bike against the fence and stumbled slightly as she did so, half-falling against it. William shuffled forward, as fast as he could. Laura grunted as the bike slid underneath her and then she was on her backside on the footpath.
‘Oh, my dear!’ said William, reaching down to her, one hand on the fence. She gave a faint smile, took his hand and slowly stood up.
William helped her right the bike. Cakes of soap, each one wrapped in tissue paper, had spilled from her front carrier. Ten cartons of eggs, held in place on the rear carrier with ocky straps, had barely moved, but the ends of some of them had staved in and were already leaking yolk and white.
Inside the house, William gave her a glass of cold water and she sat in the dining room, drinking slowly, her arms resting on the cool jarrah table. It was a beautiful room. A bay window held a view of the memorial pines, framed by leadlight parrots. An upright piano, open. Landscapes in watercolours on the walls.
She had never been inside before. It was a house that held the presence, in the scent and tone of its air, of thirty-thousand-odd days of detritus and use, of forgotten visitors, long-gone pets, accidents, joys, sickness, celebration and grief.
She gave the old man a smile. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘Five months to go. Can’t keep a thing down.’
Poor bugger, thought William. He offered her toast, then some fruit, but she wouldn’t take either, so he gave her twenty dollars for the soap and a carton of eggs and refused to take the change. He saw her off with a wave from his veranda.
Billy knew he was in trouble as soon as he saw the look on Mrs O’Reilly’s face. The older kids called her ‘The Snapdragon’. He walked around the corner of the timber-framed schoolhouse and there she was, a look of fury on her face. Billy wondered for a second if he should run, but then it was too late. She was on him, her hand on his shoulder, nails digging into his skin.
‘You little bugger,’ she said, her mouth twitching with anger. She marched him into the classroom and made him sit on the floor underneath her table while the others had lunch.
Maggie poked her head around the open doorwa
y but Mrs O’Reilly saw her, picked up the duster on her table and threw it at her. Maggie ducked and ran back to the yard.
‘I expect you know what I’m going to do to you,’ said Mrs O’Reilly.
Billy stayed silent. He knew exactly what she’d do. ‘O’Reilly fucked a half-caste girl,’ he’d told his classmates at morning recess as they sat on the hard boughs of the old pepper tree on the edge of the school grounds. He wasn’t even sure what it meant, but he knew it was wrong. One of the younger kids must’ve overheard him and told Mrs O’Reilly.
After the bell had rung and all the children returned to class, Mrs O’Reilly gave Maggie an empty tin and told her to fill it up with water. Billy sat despondently underneath Mrs O’Reilly’s desk. Her lace-up shoes were the ugliest he’d ever seen on a woman.
When Maggie returned with the tin of water, Mrs O’Reilly stood up from her chair and walked silently to the back of the room where she kept a bar of soap for just such an occasion. The class was silent. No one turned to watch her as she picked up the soap and walked back to her desk and dropped it in the water. She reached down, grabbed a handful of Billy, and hauled him out.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘This is what happens when a child in my class uses foul language. Open your mouth.’
Billy hesitated and she dug her fingers into his hair and pulled so that his face was raised to her. She scooped out the soap and rammed it between his lips and yanked his hair again so that he cried out and the soap slid between his teeth. She worked it around Billy’s mouth while he spluttered and gagged. ‘There,’ she said, releasing his hair, her face red and ugly. ‘Anyone else with a foul mouth that needs washing?’
The Colour of Kerosene and Other Stories Page 7
