Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘I won’t have it,’ he said.

  Putting her hands on the edge of the benchtop. Holding on.

  ‘It’s not for you to have or not,’ she said.

  He turned his back on her again. She could see the tension in his shoulders, those great muscles running up into his neck, pulling his head down like a bull. Years of this sort of thing. Having to fight him for whatever piece of ground she’d gained: about the girls; work; his parents; her father; the house; money, lots of times about money. Going back to work as much to have some of her own as anything else, to buy things for herself or the girls. To not be beholden. Giving way lots of times when she shouldn’t have, giving way because she wanted peace, or at least not a fight.

  This was perhaps the thing. His going away to work meant she’d been alone enough now to know she could survive without him. Intimacy long gone anyway. If intimacy meant sex. But sometimes just physical generosity, too. The desire to be held. To sleep in someone’s arms. You couldn’t say they’d swapped it for wealth, it was lost long before the mine work started. Sometime after Emily was born. Or maybe even before that, when her body had started to change with the pregnancy, and this time, with another small child to take care of, there hadn’t been the energy for that shared curiosity about her transformation which was both intimate and sexual. Her swelling belly, her swollen breasts, she’d thought, disgusted him. Afterwards, they never found their way back.

  She didn’t know what he did for sex – presuming he did anything. She didn’t ask, didn’t want to think about brothels in the Pilbara or elsewhere. Or another lover. If she allowed herself to think about it a kind of crushing guilt would overtake her. As if the failure of this aspect of the marriage had to be, by definition, her fault. Growing independent but still tied to him in so many ways. Unwilling to think of alternatives. For all sorts of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with him or the girls but were bound up in her sense of who she was; a substantial investment in the picture of herself as the happily married mother of two girls.

  He couldn’t contain it any longer. Stood up and came over to the bench with his beer in its stupid fucking stubby holder, like a boy with his teddy bear, working up to a tantrum. Waving it around.

  ‘You don’t give a fuck do you?’ he said. ‘You think you can get together with your crowd of blowins and stir up trouble and it doesn’t come back, eh? You can plaster your face all over the fucking television, saying all kinds of shit that I don’t know where it comes from. You forget I have to live in this town, too.’

  ‘I live in this town. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s why we’re all doing this. Because it’s about where we live. It’s about caring for the land.’

  ‘Don’t give me that shit. You don’t give a fuck about the land.’

  To which she could answer exactly what? I do. You don’t. I do. The whole thing reduced to a screaming match.

  ‘What you’re really saying is this is about you, isn’t it?’ she said, just as angry as he was. Hanging onto the bench for dear life. The dinner all but forgotten. The house eerily silent without the television. The girls no doubt listening hard from their rooms.

  ‘Fucking right it’s about me. It’s about me and my fucking family.’ Waving his beer around.

  ‘Which happens to include me,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, well that was a mistake, wasn’t it?’

  Terrible the way things got said in an argument that weren’t meant. Or were meant but not like they sounded. Weren’t supposed to come out like that.

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ she said. ‘Our marriage is a mistake?’

  ‘Was a fucking mistake.’

  Watching him standing there with his face distorted by a rage that was entirely out of proportion to what she’d done or was going to do, a rage in him which was always there below the surface, in varying levels of intensity, waiting to spring up, as if it was the only tool he had left to maintain control over his world or at least that part of it which was circumscribed by the home, and to which she’d always been susceptible, had wanted to ease for him, because she loved him or felt sympathy for him, or because it scared the crap out of her for reasons she had no desire to analyse but were probably something to do with her own father and all the shit that had gone down there, none of which had a fucking iota of relevance to the present situation of her wanting to be nothing more than who she was. Tears running down her cheeks despite her fury. Angry, too, that she couldn’t hide her emotions. That even if her investment in him had diminished she still put value in their marriage and here he was, articulating things she barely dared allow herself to think as a tactic to win some tiny battle, as if it was just another thing on the table. He’d said this sort of thing before. The threat. Pretending it didn’t mean anything to him. And just because it was pretence didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. The cheapness of him.

  ‘Don’t start fucking crying,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not fucking crying.’

  She turned her back on him. Threw the colander into the sink. Lifted the heavy pasta pot off the stove, poured its contents in. Refused to look around to see what he was doing. Threads of spaghetti slithering over the edge and into the drain.

  She wouldn’t back down. Wouldn’t stop doing what she believed in because it inconvenienced him. There were plenty of dairy farmers in the area who thought the dam was a rubbish idea, not just Mal Izzert. The Campbells and the Wyndhams had come down to Brisbane as well, a whole convoy of farmers’ trucks blocking George Street, putting the wind up the politicians and the police (who hadn’t a clue what to do with Friesians. Who to arrest? The cows? The farmers?). Cameras everywhere, the opportunity for media disaster abounding. The fun of it. That’s what David didn’t get, and should have, because he didn’t like authority any better than she did, it was just that he’d lost that bit of himself. Lost it in his grand pursuit of money.

  The campaign was, in part, the source of her strength. That she could do this thing. That even if she couldn’t find the right words to explain it to him there was an excitement in being able to stand up in front of the cameras and be an advocate for something. In other people wanting her to do that. She was a good nurse. Nursing was something she had done, she did still, because it paid well and because, when she’d been eighteen and finished school, she’d had to do something and it was what was offered, was one of only two professions for an educated woman that existed in her nan’s imagination. But it had never been her passion.

  These last months she’d discovered something new in herself: an ability to sit in a room full of people and understand what was going on. She could tell who was there for what reason and act on that knowledge. A talent for activism. It wasn’t an alternative profession, but neither could she imagine not doing it because her husband didn’t like it.

  This was how far she’d come.

  Someone, not her mother, had built that house on The Farm, put up those timber walls, the dirt floor, the fireplace made from curved sheets of corrugated iron which also served as the cooking stove, the double bed built into the wall where her mum and Jean-Baptiste slept when he was around, which wasn’t often. Only one room to the whole thing, a portion cut off by a curtain for her and Yvette to sleep, a veranda with a bark roof where there was a hammock in which she had lain beside her father while he read, curled within his smell, which was tobacco and marijuana, coffee and sweat.

  The book he’d been reading was called The Brother. She remembered because Jean-Baptiste had told her it was a book about him. Because she thought it remarkable that someone had written and printed and bound a book about her father and when she said that he’d laughed and corrected her and said, ‘No, it’s not about me personally, it’s what happens when you put a young boy in the hands of the Jesuits.’

  ‘What,’ she asked, ‘is a Jesuit?’

  ‘Ah, now there is a question,’ Jean-Baptiste said, drawing heavily on his cigarette, letting the smoke curl back out over his lips. ‘Something we hope you
never meet. Men in black robes who tell you how wrong you are. Anything you want to do is wrong.’ Waving the hand now that held the cigarette, his other arm around her. ‘Say you want to go down the creek, that is wrong. Say you want to stay here and read a book, or play music, or simply to think; that is wrong. Or it is the wrong book or the wrong music, or you are not sitting up straight enough, or you are thinking the wrong thoughts.’

  ‘What,’ she might have asked, ‘are wrong thoughts?’ except she already knew that because her mind was always full of wrong thoughts, about her mother (even then), or Amanda, the friend who had come to live on the property only recently, a girl her own age, whose mother was an Orange Person. They had been to India. Amanda had seen what life was like there. Men, she said, went to the toilet in the street. Yvette had called her a liar. She knew things, too, she said. She wasn’t stupid.

  At eight years old it is impossible to understand context. Bene Gesserit had been started by a group of women inspired to go bush through a complex weave of feminism and ill-informed mysticism. Over time the teachings of Osho had taken hold, including an unusual level of sexual freedom, even for those years. Some better suited to the arrangement than others. Jean-Baptiste, for all his liking of women, no good at it at all. He moved out, found someone else’s hippie house to rent closer to town, another lover, a local band to play with. The weekend of the catastrophe Eugenie hadn’t gone to stay with him. She’d had a sleep-over arranged with Amanda. It was Yvette who was alone in his little cabin when something – a spark from the fire, a kerosene lamp, a candle – set it alight.

  In the aftermath – the police, the coroner’s report, the inquest, the what-turned-out-to-be-illegal burial on Bene Gesserit attended by her distraught and confused grandparents, complete with all-night chanting and dancing by robed members of the community – it was found that Jean-Baptiste had overstayed his visa by ten years. He was deported. In the light of her mother’s incapacity to deal with her grief – her need to go to India to process what it meant to have lost a daughter – Eugenie was given into the care of her grandparents.

  Turning back with the drained pasta. He was still there, in the middle of the room. A solid man. Like his father. In a singlet that showed off his shoulders, his biceps. Board shorts. Sturdy legs. He’d always had a kind of boyish face, cheeky, but you could see, now that his hair was starting to recede, that there’d come a time, maybe in not so long, when he’d put the tools down for the last time and put on a pair of glasses and take up management completely, and that when he did he’d look like anybody else, like an accountant or a businessman. She almost felt sorry for him.

  He looked away. Picked up the remote and flicked on the sound, filling the room with the roar of the crowd. Someone must have scored. His back to her, affecting to watch the screen in much the same way as she had the dinner. A man who lived and worked amongst men most of whom had only a rudimentary interest or understanding of the environment or politics (never mind women). Ripe for manipulation by television and the popular press. There was that phrase she’d heard somewhere: it is hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not doing so; but she wasn’t sure where the observation left her, sharing the benefits.

  ‘Do you want to call the girls?’ she said, pulling plates out from the cupboard. ‘Dinner’s ready.’

  He switched off the sound again, the anger brimming but the protocols of living together still holding sway. For a little while. Going down the corridor to stick his head in their rooms.

  Leaving the words he’d said hanging.

  She put the plates out on the bench, then stopped, resting her hands on the edge again, her weight on them. Having to, to stop from falling. From the force of holding herself against him. Surprised he hadn’t let loose. Wondering if it was still to come. If he would try to use the girls to make his point. Or if, perhaps, something had changed in her that had prevented him. That maybe he sensed she didn’t care enough anymore. The awful power of indifference. The idea lurking in the back of her mind that she might have other choices. Not just because of what she was doing with the dam. At three o’clock in the morning a couple of weeks before she’d been in the hospital when the new doctor had brought in a patient. Nothing had been said, nothing done, but she’d felt it in her bones. In her waters as her nan used to say. And it didn’t matter that nothing would or could happen as a result of it. That all such feelings are, by definition, fantasies. That wasn’t the point. Someone had seen her. Someone had taken the time to look. It made all the difference.

  four

  Guy

  What he’d not been prepared for, sitting up there on stage in the carefully choreographed intimacy of armchairs and standard lamps, was the audience’s hatred. It caught him off-guard, undermining his sense of self (never as unequivocal as many believed) bringing into question long-held certainties. When he addressed the public – on panels, giving keynotes, during those episodes of First Edition filmed in front of a live audience – he was used to admiration, or at least, if that was too strong a word, deference. It had taken some time, admittedly, but he’d finally grown accustomed to the vitriol that spooled out in the comments below his online articles; he’d come to understand these rants were nothing to do with him, per se, they were an expression of some fundamental disaffection amongst the wider population, an anonymous vein of anger searching for an outlet which just happened to have settled on him, or, at best, what he’d written.

  Helen, in one of those blanket dismissals of whole sections of society which had become more common in this last year, the year of her illness, would have it that it was a manifestation of the politics of envy, an attempt to shift responsibility for the shape of people’s own lives onto someone else. Which was as may be, but in the Winderran Community Centre it was different. The people in the audience were flesh and blood, several with names he knew, and their anger was personal and immediate. It struck him like a physical attack; if it was envy, he wanted to ask, of what? Which part of his life, exactly, was it that someone else might want?

  It was Aldous Bain who’d got him into this. He and Peter Mayska had flattered him, no point in pretending otherwise, and he’d been susceptible to that, even from a man like Bain, with his studied use of the vernacular, his we don’t have a dog in the fight, the idiom as fake as his moleskin slacks and light blue open-necked cotton shirt; the Shadow Minister’s knowledge of the bush entirely secondhand, derived from the lesser partners in the Coalition; the man wouldn’t know a cattle dog, let alone a fighting one, if it bit him on the ankle. The two of them plying him with excess and privilege so that his judgement was compromised and he’d said he’d do it, having convinced himself, against all evidence to the contrary, that it would be a rational debate. But then he’d refused to look, hadn’t he? Social media being beneath his consideration.

  Blind-sided from every quarter. Even a glance at the NoDam’s Facebook page would have given him notice that his opposite number was to be Eugenie Lensman, a woman he’d barely seen for ten years but who had, nonetheless, come to occupy a significant place in his imagination. When she strode up to him backstage, with that regal bearing of hers, face framed by its mane of tight curled hair, hand outstretched, he was instead caught unawares, lulled into a false sense of security by what he took as a genuine welcome and, how can he put this, the resonance of his own creation.

  The first time they’d met her father had been visiting from France. The man, in a wonderful show of Gallic arrogance, had called Guy up, cold, to see if he and his daughter, a resident of the town, might come to visit, to talk about Guy’s books – a musician to a writer; a request so unusual that he’d accepted. It was a mistake; the father, for all his reading, had proved to be tedious, wanting to discuss his experience of the creation of art and his fanciful interpretations of Guy’s characters. The consolation had been the presence of Eugenie, standing by his bookshelves leafing through various volumes, remaining all but silent throughout, but thus presentin
g herself as the model for a character he’d been struggling with at the time. The novel – a sprawling early-settlement narrative – had required a female protagonist, strong but wistful, much troubled by external forces, capable of great love but rarely receiving it in return. Eugenie had seemed the perfect embodiment. The problem with such a projection being that, on meeting her again, years later, some part of his brain conflated the real with the imaginary.

  The intervening years had given her more confidence. As she shook his hand, telling him he wouldn’t remember her, she said that, like her father, she was an admirer of his books, further surprising him by naming several of them, Magazine Husbands, Indolent Thing, even The Brother, all of them, of course, early works, but no mind. Husbands was, she said, her favourite.

  ‘That was the first book I wrote in Winderran,’ he’d replied, launching into a description of his process, in thrall to his fantasy of this woman, ‘I’d been overseas for a few years and my wife and I had just settled in. It was as if I was seeing the country through an outsider’s eyes.’

  In actual fact her show of interest had been little more than a tactic to put him at ease, all the better to destroy him in the debate.

  ‘I see you often these days, on TV,’ she said, smiling, ‘talking about books.’

  It was certain comments he’d made during an episode of First Edition which had got him into this situation. They’d slipped out, unplanned, in response to something his co-presenter, Sheila, had said. The woman had been baiting him for most of the program, which was, on this occasion, being recorded live at a writers’ festival. The disagreements between them were the meat of the show, they both understood that – after all, if they liked the same books there would have been nothing to say – and they played to these differences; but any acting involved in the performance was more to do with the pretence they liked each other than in the sparring. Sheila was insufferable. She turned up each month in ever more obscure garments – Nepalese smocks woven from yak’s hair, Myanmar silks, a Dirndl blouse – supposedly with the aim of making some sort of avant-garde fashion statement. Clothes which would have looked awkward on a twenty-year-old. Horribly pleased with herself, sitting across from him with her rhinestone glasses hung on a string around her neck and her ridiculous hair; smiling. Never ceasing to smile. They might be discussing the most awful excesses of child soldiers in some African state, or the legacy of Primo Levi, and there she would be with that television presenter’s grin on her, all teeth and glossy lipstick.