by Rodney Hall
– Just look at the bludger, Billy roared. Can’t get his thieving hands on the cash fast enough. He couldn’t help being a bit ashamed of Tony.
At this they all set on Maggot, dragged him about and pummelled him till he begged for mercy and reminded them he was technically their uncle, which was true, and that uncles deserve respect.
– The winners cook the tucker, declared Peter drunkenly sprawling in a prime spot near the fire. The rest of us’ve got to recover. Speaking for myself I’ve got three broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder.
– Great deeds, droned Lance in his grammar-school voice. Will be perfo … performed on the morrow.
– The what-o?
– Morrow. And he flexed his muscles, touching them lightly here and there as if a stranger, unaware of the thornbush antagonism around him, that by some unspoken consent it was agreed he had over-exposed his education this time.
– Hey get moving you lazy pig you’re one of the cooks.
– Rum, more rum, Maggot called from the luxury of indolence, hoping to change the subject because he was the most tolerant; watching as the night trees, the truck, the fire and friends began to spin and roll in a carefree manner. I’m dying of thirst. Wylie, where’s my faithful darkie guide, Wylie save my life mate, pass me the bottle of Bundaberg, this desert’s killing me, time enough when we reach the coast to fight off the Temperance League; if there is a coast.
Steaks sizzled on the fire and fat hunks of bread passed from hand to hand following the bottle. A simple meal of strong flavours. As they ate they loved each other for this closeness. Their language became even more raucous and abusive. Later that night they spread sleepingbags in the truck, wriggled into them, hauled a tent over the top for a dew sheet and were immediately asleep. After an hour or so, Maggot called out quite loudly from his dream – Show ’em!
The first shock of the morning was how stiff and hung over they were, how the cold struck up from the metal chilling their backs. No one had a civil word to say. The second shock quite eclipsed the first: they were not alone. Just along the track stood a hut with a drift of smoke issuing from its chimney pipe. Inhabited. They decided a deputation should attend to the matter of contact with the natives. Billy and Dave struggled out of their bags and jumped about to get the circulation going.
– It’s bloody warmer out here than in there, said Dave.
They set off for the hut.
Four
– There was this fellow, Billy told Vivien eventually. An old fellow.
– Yes? Having released her hand from his she played with his hair, parting it, combing it with her fingers.
– We were driving up the gold track behind the mountain when we came on a hut. Dave and me looked in at the window. There was an amazing guy sitting at the table, a real hermit. He looked up at me and then turned his head away. No wave, no surprise, even though people never use that track. Like he was expecting us. Nothing, except maybe his eyes showing he already knew us. And he didn’t think much of what he knew either. Round we went to the door, you can imagine us, and we knocked. No answer. So we knocked again, of course, because we knew he was there. Then we opened it in case he was deaf and we called out goodday.
(This one night he’d lain in fear of hoodlums, hearing them cavorting round the place, lighting a fire without proper caution, he’d gone to give them a piece of his mind and send them packing, but saw the firelight flickering on half-naked bodies twined and straining together. It was a fucking orgy. And you could hear the drunks and their drunken betting, so he sat up to be ready for them, placed his rifle on the table, one hand on the butt, sat through the dark, eyes swollen, sleepless and heavy with the dark, hearing a sinister quiet, imagining what they could be doing. Surrounding the hut? Then praying they might have gone, only to hear one call some code: show them.
(Through all the years he’d complained who cares about me? knowing this was a blank he had never filled. In the same way he’d say one in, all in! Yes, not above a bit of a joke, living solitary as he did. The serious side being his principles he’d lived by in the days when he’d needed them. On principle this and on principle that. My duty as I see it, no one can say fairer, straight from the shoulder, not one to mince words … these props shored up his sparse Irish inheritance and on occasion concealed his lapses into goodwill. Lately, deluding himself out of the stifling fear of death, he would add I’m half the man I was last year, as if six months might be a passing phase.
(He sat aching, chilled, moving only in order to toss a fresh log in the stove. Next thing it would be dawn. The sound of tramping footsteps. Close. Now. This was the time. They were coming to get him. He glanced at the window in time to see two delinquents staring in, one of them seeming to laugh. That’d be their style alright. Boots on the gravel … towards the … door as…)
– He was dead, poor old coot, Billy explained. Already dead. Just in that moment. You couldn’t believe. And his hand on his rifle. We opened the door, Dave and me, just in time to see his head flop back like the neck was broke. He began to slip off the chair. And his rifle went bam! Gave us one hell of a fright, I can tell you. The bullet buried itself in the wall, we found it afterwards. Vivien’s fingers asked him what he did then. I rushed up to the table yelling you stupid fucking bastard of course. But he was dead. We only wanted to ask some advice. He was an old prospector you see. He could have helped us.
(He died knowing the sun that moment would be rising at Whitey’s Fall, light striking the highest houses filling their windows with gold, where they overlooked pits and hollows still flooded by an outbreak of despair issuing from abandoned diggings. His rusty corpse sprawled, jammed halfway under the table still waiting for what had already come. Not aware that at this moment three shrivelled gold diggers who’d known him better than themselves tidied their campsite on the opposite spur, sipped stewed tea in the early twilight, pissed scaldingly among the ferns and trudged downhill, pans in hand, to their separate destinies. Trudged, their backs to the disused mineshafts that they themselves, and he who had died, helped work when there was still anything in them. Tramped downhill towards the dark creek where they sifted and sluiced the dirt for whatever former hopes history might spare them.)
– Who was he? Vivien asked, feeling herself inadequate.
– Uncle used to know him. McAloon. A bad case, the gold got him thirty years ago. Before that there was a war he went to and turned nasty when he came back, dug up a corpse. Gold makes you suspicious. Nice little place though, he must have got a kick out of building that hut. Solid.
(As McAloon died, dairyfarmers at Whitey’s Fall, their elbows on kitchen tables of their own, blearily admired wives who had already stoked the stoves and called in the cows in the old fashion and had ritually set aromatic teapots ready beside the altar of the alarm clock; farmers who drowsed where they sat, contented and yet with the anguish of prisoners, hearing the cows anxious for relief in the milking sheds come nuzzling and breathing at the gate. As Mr McAloon’s dead hand fired the rifle, Mr Brinsmead and Mr Ping shuffled to doors of their respective establishments, grinding the stiff bolts and releasing cats to drift out in a balloon of warmth. Up the hill at the Mountain Hotel, Jasper the publican banged the first of his golden windows up exactly as that bullet hit the hut wall, and stood helpless, a man sculpted from dough, surrounded by a crowd of up-ended stools. Haunted by the years of ambition when he fought his brother in the courts, he coughed and spat into the street, into the dawn. Spat, oppressed by the pub’s tradition of good times. Whitey’s Fall, a town to be proud of, knew nothing about the death of James Richmond Ellis McAloon, for thirty-four years agent of Their Majesties the sovereigns of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, inspector of mines and tyrant of the licensing regulations, and twenty-nine years layabout drunk, who died frightened and sober, besieged by the hooligans he heard about on his Astor mantel-model till the valves gave out.)
– What the hell! yelped Dave.
– Fuckingbloodybastard! Bi
lly jumped in to restrain the man at the table. But Mr James Richmond Ellis McAloon, known as Kel, was dead. His finger, still hard against the trigger, the rifle butt slipping down from where it had struck the chair-back. That look of terror and recognition totally wiped from his eyes, the face a sudden drained white. The stove with its firebox open, burning energetically, the clock going and in good order, and on the walls one smoke-cured calendar of a lady without clothes beside a hand-drawn map and a rack of pans and prospecting tools. The two youths, now certain the hermit was dead, tried unsuccessfully to sit him back on his chair, then opted for moving the table and stretching him flat on the floor, it seemed wrong to leave him in this doll-like indignity.
– I’ll stay with him, Bill Swan offered. You go and get the others, Tony’d better use my bike and fetch that cop.
Dave answered like a dutiful recruit, thankful to take orders and not have to think, and went.
Billy knelt down to speak to the corpse: you poor old soldier, with your life. Didn’t you have anything but this then? He experimented at touching the gluey eyelids. Then he did a really unaccountable thing, he stroked the man’s face with the back of his hand, tenderly perhaps, feeling the stubble, the curious bony structure of it, the stiff sunken cheek. Oh man, he breathed. Oh man. This was something awful. The dead right hand in his, he was shaking it.
The corpse wore a jacket over pyjamas and a greatcoat on top of that. Bill Swan did up the neck button on the pyjamas out of concern for the dignity of man. He reached across to the bunk pulling free a grey blanket to flag over the body. Oh man, Bill Swan said gently, almost admonishingly. You got yourself into a mess and never found a way out. This was a real corpse. In Whitey’s Fall so few ever died, they all threatened to live as long as you could imagine. And he began to understand it wasn’t death from age you puzzled about, but death before you were ready.
He left the rifle where it had fallen. Somewhere down the track he heard the crouping of his motorcycle followed by a dwindling drone. With only a minute left of undisturbed intimacy with the dead, I’m sorry, he said to the corpse, sorry for everything mate. Rats could be heard resuming their routine activities under the floor, a tiny blue wren fluttered into the cabin and hopped about pecking at this and that, perfectly at home. Billy watched the sun-scoured head so grim and bitter. He couldn’t help thinking of the contrast with Uncle, Uncle’s merry brown face. When Uncle stopped smiling fans of pale sunless lines appeared round his eyes like a network of scar tissue, so even at his most severe he couldn’t keep it up, his customary expression still printing its disruptive ghost on his features. Yet Billy had a wry suspicion the two of them might be related.
– What’s going on here? Lance swaggered in newly aware of his own importance since last night’s wrestling match.
Dave ushered the others into the presence of tragedy. Bill was on his feet and had his back turned, casually studying the calendar woman. A yawning power filled him, rising and subsiding: he had been with a dead man. Would his friends discover signs if he let them see his face?
– Who was he? Lance demanded.
The corpse exercised terrific presence, his tired face so tired, his clothes filthy and rumpled, dust ingrained in his hands.
– Where did the bullet hit, Dave?
– See? Buried right in the wood.
– Twenty-two.
Bill tinkered with things on the shelf: badly dinted pans, an auger of the old hand type, an iron mortar for dollying, two torches, some cold chisels and a battered notebook. He took possession of the book.
– That’s official isn’t it? Lance challenged him (so he’d been watching, suspecting).
– The johns’ll get it if we leave it here.
They faced each other as enemies, then allowed the moment to deflate. Bill pocketed the book.
– What’s the smell? asked Lance sulkily.
– Shit his pants I reckon. Looks like it’s soaking out on to the floor.
The old cove, yes, who knew about secrecy. Whatever gold he found he must have kept the news to himself.
Lance wrinkled his nose at the blot of clay-coloured fluid. He stood so tall and secure and uncaring, aware that Bill Swan needed a punch in the head before he’d stop bossing other people’s lives, same as Uncle the loudmouthed stickybeak.
Bill looked across the gulf.
– If you ask me, there never was a Golden Fleece, Lance sneered with the intention of wounding. Those Brinsos’d be certified anywhere but Whitey’s, for sure.
(Food had been one of Kel McAloon’s torments. He suffered a chronic gastric complaint which first robbed him of appetite and then rendered useless most of what he did manage to eat. He hated and feared his bowels. Some evenings he’d have fits of wind, knots in the gut becoming severe shooting pains, then the steady lead pipe stuck down through his chest to his groin, and he’d dry retch till he could induce the first wind to break. The following four hours he’d be absorbed in twisting his body, squeezing out balloons of gas, arching his belly, bending his back, reaching out his arms or curling up to hug his knees, tensed, stretched on his back, on his side, a man on the rack, while burps barked and farts fluttered. If the indigestion came on him severely, a violent diarrhoea would result, after which he’d collapse and lie exhausted well into the next morning, muttering obscenities at the injustice of his fate. Or else it would be followed by bloated visions of himself and the mountain swimming together underwater, changing shape and mass, exchanging shape and mass, wallowing and merging, forest trees the bubbles of his own breath, his shoulder the numb mountain, a ridge his arm, his legs stuck deep underground.)
By eleven o’clock the formalities were completed. The police took charge of the situation. There was nothing more to be done. The boys were free to leave. The whole forest screamed with cicadas as the Bedford whined unsteadily up the hill past the dead man’s hut into the dense enveloping bush, leaving the police car behind with its blue light flashing. The track grew steeper and hugged close in against the rockface. The vegetation took on the character of rainforest with long tendrils of vines draping the eucalypts their full length, clusters of treeferns, a canopy so thick the sun never penetrated it.
Billy drove, the steeringwheel jolting pleasantly in his hands. But the smell of that hut haunted him, the shock of having been shot at kept his heart pounding. The Bedford, the bush, the birds, the logging track itself, all were clean and restorative. The power of being touched ebbed. He was struck by the oddity that secrecy might grow with knowledge. Had this McAloon found gold?
– What next? Billy called so they could all hear him. A few grunts greeted the question. Wind flustered and went sighing among leaves, a pair of gang-gangs squawked cheerily, took to air scattering olive and scarlet among the branches. Dust feathered up behind the tailboard. Occasionally the forest parted to allow glimpses of cattle country below. The motor thumped like a paddlesteamer, goldgoldgold. The temperature indicator crept into the red, Bill tapped it to show Tony.
– Better take things easy ay?
– Yair.
Those in the back joggled about, mulling over the possibilities of their future, their careers in the city. A future meant you could succeed or fail. In Whitey’s Fall nobody could fail. That was the difference. That was why they were going away.
Five
– Remember when we climbed down that cliff? Billy spoke very softly delivering the words right in Vivien’s ear as she rested her head in his lap. I suppose… I was, well, jealous in a way. Because you could look at Mrs Ping while I was killing myself holding the truck. His breath came in hot puffs that left her cold afterwards. I wanted to face up to it.
– But you knew her, that’s worse.
– When I saw Mr McAloon I was angry because he shot at us. But excited too. Billy sat up, separating himself from her.
– One thing … she began, discovering his hand.
– I know. His roughened fingers cradled her face but he didn’t dare look at her. The moonligh
t was now brilliant and he couldn’t be sure of himself. I know, you’re going to ask why I said: what if I pushed you off the rock?
You were climbing down with me even though you didn’t know me. As if everything had to be alright.
– As if you couldn’t be dangerous?
He nodded, the hobbledehoy who trained his hair to stay flat and to work up a signature he could call his own.
They smiled together. Vivien felt his hand cup her ear, one fingertip probing, ruffling the tiny audible hairs.
– What next? he asked.
She was too astonished to attempt any reply. Billy thought of the contrast between them. He felt wise and mature. He knew from television what her world was, but she could have no knowledge of the mountain.
Vivien strove to relate the tenderness of his hands to the bullying voice.
– Are you married? she asked. It made him snort into the great night of cities and ships. Her despairing fingers cruised inside his shirt causing him to arch with pleasure. But fear warned him she was stealing his will. Some theft of this kind had happened before. A suffocating heap of flowers. An enchantress among her pigs. He’d suffered shipwreck for the sake of her song, a dozen years of enforced indolence robbing him of his prime.
– It’s the place, he apologized.
– The place? she echoed bitterly, breaking contact, standing. She led the way indoors to the bedroom. Slowly she walked, not to strain the thread of her power.
Stubbornness kept him where he was, cold on the boards by himself, the storm of excitement subsiding, listening pitilessly to a giveaway shoe falling empty on the lino, a sigh of lost breath. He was mesmerized by half-forgotten lessons: the jangling touch of rapiers, an expectant crow, a bell clanging far off for early mass, the rapiers whipping together, nose running, the whirl and sting of the first engagement, blood. He could smell the dew, he wanted the business over. Voices told him, watch out Billy, man. He lay on the verandah and contemplated falling asleep.
