Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  Standing.

  ‘We should keep going, hey? It’ll be lunchtime soon. We’ll go downstream to the second crossing. How’re the girls coping, anyway?’

  Changing the subject. As if it might just go away after saying something like that. Eugenie trailing along behind her on the narrow track that paralleled the creek and, despite herself, falling into the pattern of child-talk, telling Lindl about Sandrine going into high school for the first time, how Emily was struggling in primary, the difficulty of juggling these tensions as virtually a single mother, as if these practicalities were what she’d wanted to discuss.

  The path skirting a small waterfall, maidenhair fern on either side. The sound of voices ahead.

  Below the fall was a wide circular pool, broad enough that the sun could find its way to the flashing water. Thick Lomandra crowding its edge except on the far side where the stream spilled across a shelf of rock. A man and woman were swimming, their bodies pale in the dark water.

  ‘Bloody hippies,’ Lindl said, quietly.

  They had little choice except to come around the side of the pool, but it was awkward because the swimmers hadn’t seen them, they were engaged in their own little game – not actually having sex, thankfully – just amorous play. It was only when the two women came out onto the flat rocks, where the track crossed the creek and the swimmers’ clothes lay in discarded piles, that they were noticed.

  ‘Hi,’ the dark-haired girl said, waving. ‘The water’s lovely, you should come in.’

  ‘Hi,’ Lindl replied. ‘I bet it is. Just wondering, though, what you think you’re doing?’ Her tone gentle, but firm.

  ‘Having a swim,’ the girl said, stating the obvious. ‘We’re from the camp.’ Gesturing off to the right. ‘We thought we’d come up this way, get away from everyone. It’s really cool here. Is this your land?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The girl swam towards them, rising naked from the water, finding her feet on the wet rock with both remarkable ease and lack of self-consciousness, squeezing her thick hair and pushing it back over one shoulder, proudly full-breasted, dark nipples tight from the cold water, a thick bush between unshaven legs, a natural girl this one, perhaps of Greek extraction, certainly something Mediterranean; a small tattoo at the base of her spine, a series of six straight parallel lines.

  The young man, long hair plastered on his scalp, hung back in the water.

  ‘Ange,’ the girl said, holding out her hand. ‘Hope you don’t mind us swimming in your creek. You must be so pissed off with them wanting to build a dam here, hey? I mean, can you believe it? How fucked is that?’

  ‘Pretty fucked,’ Lindl said.

  ‘I saw you, at the forum,’ Ange said, turning to Eugenie. ‘That was you wasn’t it? You were really good. How was that guy, hey? I mean really screwed. He’s some kind of writer, isn’t he? Like, a dinosaur.’ Reaching down for a shift-like top and pulling it over her head, rendered more rather than less naked by the thin cloth sticking to her wet skin, the toes of her bare feet splayed on the rock; some sort of feral animal.

  ‘Hey, Will,’ she said. ‘You can get out. It’s all right. I’m sure these ladies’ve seen what you’ve got before.’ Coming back around to them. ‘But listen, hey, can I show you something? You see this thing up here?’

  She pointed across the pool to another of Geoff’s boxes, fastened with cable ties to a palm tree.

  ‘D’you think we ought to fuck with it?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Lindl said.

  ‘Is it the government?’ Ange asked.

  ‘No, no. It’s us, we’re monitoring frogs in the creek.’

  Ange laughing. A joyful noise, full of fun and self-deprecation.

  ‘Shit, hey?’ she said. ‘Well, there you go. Will and I were thinking we ought to smash it, you know. Just weren’t sure how to do it without being seen. Can’t be too careful, hey. We figured the government was watching to see who came here. Recording it all. They’re none too fond of us anti-dammers.’

  ‘The scientists will have great fun listening to you and your friend.’

  The young man emerged from the pool, but reluctantly, stumbling on the slippery rocks, muscular but hang-dog, trying to cover his parts as he made a lunge for his clothes. His right arm tattooed with a complete sleeve, difficult to tell what the images were except that there appeared to be a sword at their centre. Another significant tattoo on his left thigh, multi-coloured. Projecting resentment in the way only surly young men can.

  ‘So, d’you find any frogs?’ Ange asked.

  ‘Some,’ Lindl said.

  To Eugenie’s surprise Lindl offered a round-up of what was going on with the campaign, answering whatever the girl asked, as if she was herself an active participant, as if the information was open to anyone, getting it all mixed up in the process. Although, in fairness, it was always hard to explain to outsiders the way the town operated: there weren’t just two opposing groups, each side was made up of different collections of people who didn’t necessarily agree on philosophy or strategy. It wasn’t an organised campaign, there was no leader, people did their own things. Sometimes it came together, most often it didn’t.

  Not that Ange seemed particularly interested. Her questions were, Eugenie thought, just a way of inserting herself into things. If she were an animal it would be something burrowing. She had, she realised, taken immediate objection to the girl, possibly because of the way she’d said they were anti-dammers, as if anyone could just walk in after all the months of hard campaigning and become one of them, which she supposed, actually, anyone could, in fact everyone was invited to. But all the same.

  ‘We planted this bit of forest,’ Lindl said. ‘We think …’

  ‘You did?’ Ange interrupted.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wow. That’s really cool. You mean this wasn’t here, before?’

  ‘No. There was a bit of remnant further downstream. This was open paddocks, cattle in the creek. We think there’s a colony of Giant Barred frogs living here now … that’s what we’re recording. They’re critically endangered. We figure there must have been a breeding pair in the remnant and now they’ve colonised what we’ve planted. If we find some … well, that’ll be the end of the dam, won’t it?’

  Eugenie broke in. ‘We need to keep going,’ she said. ‘Marcus will be waiting, won’t he?’

  Lindl stopping mid-sentence, a little affronted.

  ‘It’s all good,’ Ange said, ‘we need to get back up the camp ourselves, hey, Will?’

  The young man had pulled on a pair of heavy denim trousers which he now wore low on the hips, the brand name of his underpants exposed above the waistband. Naked, for all his tatts and his sullenness, he’d been well formed. Dressed, he was risible, clearly in awe of the girl, open-mouthed, nodding his agreement.

  Out of earshot they laughed at the queerness of the meeting, the studied naivety of the girl, the doting boy.

  ‘You didn’t like me talking to her?’ Lindl said.

  ‘You’re very trusting,’ she replied.

  ‘Which is another way of saying I’m naive?’

  Eugenie thought it best not to answer.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Lindl said, ‘but weren’t they beautiful?’

  It seemed an odd observation. She’d been so critical of them; the young man’s tattoos; his stupid homey trousers; the girl’s proud nudity, the unshaven legs and armpits. Some niggling little person in the back of her head speaking in her nan’s voice, whispering, She could be pretty if she looked after herself. Tainting everything. She’d not seen what Lindl saw.

  They came back out into the paddocks, walking up through grassland on an old farm track. Cows in the field on the top side with lovely soft brown skin, chewing the cud, unmoved by their presence, wonderfully content. A catbird calling its weird complaint from somewhere in the forest behind.

  ‘Before, you know,’ Eugenie asked, ‘what did you mean about being a target?’

 
‘Oh that. It’s rubbish, just ignore it.’

  ‘Is there some threat I should know about?’

  ‘You mean other than the decision to resume this land and build a dam on it that destroys thirty years’ work?’

  ‘Well, yes. Other than that.’

  ‘It’s just me,’ Lindl said, coming to a halt, taking off her hat and pushing her hair back, dismissing the question. ‘You know how it is, some days I get depressed. I think that’s what it is. I mean seriously, clinically. This stuff taps into everything that came up about my mother’s family … the things I found out.’

  Lindl’s mother had died of cancer. During her last months she had driven down to Brisbane several times a week to nurse her. Then, after she’d gone, Lindl had been obliged to sort through the house, dividing up a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff into equal portions. The job falling to her because, of her two brothers, the first was also an artist and wouldn’t do it – even if he needed the money more than Lindl – and the second was a lawyer who’d become, in his middle age, strangely rapacious, as if the things he got from the house were more important to him than his relationship with his sister, as if gaining a larger share of their dead parents’ possessions made up for some perceived lack.

  In her mother’s desk Lindl had found correspondence between her grandfather and his family in Germany, the ones who hadn’t got out. It wasn’t a story she’d known about. That they were Jews had barely been mentioned during her childhood. The letters had affected her profoundly, more perhaps, than Eugenie had realised. One of the things Eugenie loved about Lindl was the way she transformed her life into a series of stories, imbuing each of the characters – brothers, parents, grandparents – with this remarkable vibrancy, pillorying them, yes, but also linking them to figures in art and literature, to history, philosophy, psychoanalysis. To Freud, to Rilke and his density of childhood. Sometimes the stories were so compelling that she got lost in them, forgot that Lindl wasn’t just the narrator, she was an active participant.

  ‘But I don’t want to talk about me,’ Lindl said. ‘I’d rather talk about you.’

  ‘What about me?’ Eugenie said.

  ‘Didn’t you want to talk about you and David?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Lindl asked.

  ‘All sorts of things,’ Eugenie said, so as to avoid saying, straight out, I’m thinking of leaving, taking my girls, doing a runner. Now that there was space to speak the problems seemed to be impossible to articulate without sounding self-indulgent or self-serving; as if the long hot haul back up the hill towards the house was some kind of metaphor for the task of summing up where she’d come to.

  ‘Like?’

  There was a yellow plastic sign hanging on the wire next to them showing a graphic of a lightning bolt, the kikuyu grass growing thick around the star pickets with their black insulators. It was hot again and she still didn’t have a hat. From where they were they could see the camp in the distance, over by the main road.

  As a way around it she talked about lack of love, lack of any kind of intimacy between them, David’s passive-aggressiveness, his disinterest in his family. The differences between them that fly-in/fly-out only seemed to be making worse. Her belief it wasn’t just her, that the girls, too, would be better off out of there.

  It sounded as if she were ticking off a list on a PowerPoint slide.

  ‘All marriages are fraught with this sort of thing,’ Lindl said, in a tone that suggested she, too, was responding by rote. ‘You just have to work through them. They pass.’

  It wasn’t what Eugenie wanted to hear. The unkind thought surfacing that Lindl didn’t understand. That their relationship was one-way: she listened, Lindl spoke.

  Her friend, though, was way ahead of her. ‘Unless of course,’ she said, ‘you don’t want to do it anymore. Or there’re other factors involved you’re not telling me about.’

  In the early days, before Marcus, when she’d been an artist, a printmaker, Lindl had, by her own account, traded on her beauty, being courted by rich men and poor, intellectuals and morons, sleeping with more than a few of them, not saying which was which. It wasn’t, she’d told Eugenie, that she’d necessarily wanted to, it was that she hadn’t known how not to, as if the needs of the men who pursued her had precluded her own or, no, that, maybe, her needs were the men’s needs, which wasn’t to say that she’d been happy or even enjoying herself. The only place that she could remember having been happy in those days was in her studio, when she was making art.

  ‘Don’t take me as any kind of model,’ she said, now. ‘Based on what I’ve told you. I was lucky to even see Marcus. He was so upright, so straight, so solid, he was almost invisible. In those days, you know, I walked through walls, I walked through people like him for a living and yet one day there he was, the one person I couldn’t get around, a person who refused to stay in one place for long enough to give me time to get used to the idea of him.

  ‘I guess what I’m saying,’ Lindl said, ‘is that sometimes it’s hard to see your partner clearly. If there is another man … it’s worth considering where you are. If you jump ship, you should know why you’re doing it. You need to make sure you’re not simply shifting partners because you don’t want to deal with what’s there. You might end up in the same place, only with someone much worse.’

  ‘I’m not leaving David to go to some other man,’ Eugenie said, disappointed her friend might think it so.

  Disappointed, too, that Lindl wasn’t encouraging her to go out and explore the world. She wanted to be told it would be okay to fly from David. Her experience was so much less than Lindl’s. She’d only had three lovers before him. Four sexual experiences with men. Going straight from school into nursing and from there into marriage, no room for deviation after what had happened to her. Density of childhood indeed. What she was wondering, now, was if it was too late. Not to have lovers who are intellectuals or morons or something in between, but to have a life.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I don’t even know if this man’s even aware I exist. He’s not the reason.’

  Lying through her teeth. The doctor wasn’t the reason, but he was a factor. If he wasn’t, why else would she have told him where he could find her on a Friday night?

  ‘Excellent,’ Lindl said. ‘Not that it matters, but do I know him?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  They were almost at the house. Lindl looping her arm through hers. ‘Come, we’ll have lunch. A cup of tea. We can talk more later.’

  ‘The cure-all,’ Eugenie said.

  ‘I’m not telling you what you want to hear, am I?’ Lindl said. ‘But it’s hard for me. The only thing that makes any sense to me these days seems to be nurturing the relationships that matter. Like this one with you. Like the one I have with this piece of land. It’s all I have left.’

  While they’d been down the creek Marcus had laid out lunch on the veranda; fresh bread, cheese, salad, peeled hard-boiled eggs and cold white wine. As they ate he and Eugenie fell into campaign talk. Their default mode. Who’d said what, who’d written what. Marcus offered up an interesting piece of dirt on one of those who’d chosen to support the dam. Lindl interrupted him part way through.

  ‘Do we have to talk about this all the time?’ she said. ‘It’s all we ever talk about. Going around and around in circles.’

  ‘Yes, darling,’ Marcus said. ‘But it’s important. If we don’t fight, if we don’t stand up for ourselves who’s going to do it for us?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Don’t treat me like an idiot. Please. I live here. I’m your wife. But all this is so hateful. The way you refer to the other side by their surnames. Lamprey, Barkham, Tweedie. It’s like you’re all back at boarding school in your loathsome little cliques.’

  Something about the force with which she spoke shocked Eugenie. This glimpse into another couple’s dynamic. On the way back up the path Lindl had listed the relationships that ma
ttered. She hadn’t mentioned Marcus. He didn’t respond to her tirade, but she could see him backing up inside and that, also, this might be a kind of default for him, this deference to his wife. It didn’t make him appear weak, just vulnerable, and a small ray of warmth for him pushed past all the little irritations of the campaign.

  ‘We did meet the most curious individual down along the creek,’ Lindl said.

  The naked Ange stepping out of the dark water already become, in her mind, a delicious tale.

  seven

  Guy

  He had met Helen at his London publishing house, a four-storey terrace in Bloomsbury whose once-grand rooms had been cut into small, high-ceilinged offices filled, stacked, encrusted with books and piles of ribbon-tied manuscripts. The sort of place where it was possible from time to time to glimpse a giant of literature slipping in to discuss proofs or to wheedle for an advance. There himself to go through the contract for Magazine Husbands. Helen was amongst the group of editors and subs who invited him to join them for a drink at the close of business. They went home together that night, that’s how immediate it was; he, the young talent, tall, frail, hollow-chested, smoking furiously, she, at twenty-four, also an ex-pat, precise, pretty, embarrassed that her smile displayed too much of her top teeth and gums, articulate, very much of her time, which is to say pushing the boundaries of what was possible for a woman in England in 1972. She told him later that she hadn’t thought she’d ever sleep with an Australian man again. She’d thought, these were her words, this was the way she spoke, this was why he fell in love with her, she thought she was beyond Australian men with their attitude to alcohol, their incomprehensible embrace of the ordinary in the face of the marvellous.

  He’d been in the city for almost two years by then, scraping by on the royalties from The Brother and occasional commissions for book reviews, living on the third floor of a shared house in Hammersmith; not a whit less unhappy or isolated than he’d been when he quit university and took up residence in a converted shed on a farm owned by a group of early hippies out at Mangrove Mountain, where his first novel had come into being. He’d flown to London on the back of it, to construct a reputation in a place where it mattered. Disappointed in, amongst other things, the English girls, so sexy with their proper speech, their buttoned-up clothes, but failing always to deliver on the promise of their inflections, as if it was all veneer, that when those clothes came off they were exactly what you saw and nothing more, vulnerable, naked girls, who didn’t know quite what to do. Probably it was his own fault; he wasn’t naive about that. He didn’t know any better himself. Helen was different: We’re here to enjoy each other, she said, the word ‘here’ in this context meaning our very presence on earth. What happens in this bed, between us, she said, this is the important thing. With her he’d been prepared to allow for such a possibility without the customary aftermath of guilt and self-loathing, to enter into a space of joy with a lover as if, and here was the crux of it, as if it were a God-given right. The first time she took him in her mouth, in that pale room with its view over the street, wan winter sunlight plotting soft geometric patterns on the walls, she sliding down his belly to address his cock, doing it so delicately, so caringly, as if she loved it, his thing, the actual physical manifestation of it in her hand both so impossibly sexual and deeply disturbing at the same instant – her eyes on his, her lips and hands on him – he burst into tears, involuntarily, his body shaking, his cock shrivelling so that she stopped and asked what she’d done wrong, what was the matter, Wasn’t I doing it right? And he’d had to pull himself together and say, No, no, it’s not you, you’re doing it perfectly, it’s just no-one’s done that before, nobody has ever said I love you in that way, in the deepest part of me.