Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘A little, nothing of real note,’ Guy says.

  ‘Which you can use?’

  ‘It gives me a general sense of the woman’s political background. Explains why she’s able to hold her own at a meeting. I did find out something else … her grandfather was a union rep before her … at the Great Western Milling Company. He’s mentioned in a newspaper article about the factory being closed for a week after a worker was injured.’

  Armistead digs out a pair of half glasses, something Lamprey thought went out of fashion twenty years ago, and shuffles the bits of paper in front of him. It occurs to Guy that he might have overstepped the mark, that, for all his willingness to help, Armistead is still studying the union’s history and might be sympathetic to one of its members. But it turns out that what he’s doing is making sure everything is as he left it, that Lamprey hasn’t mixed anything up. When he’s done he looks up at Guy with rheumy eyes, peering over the top of the rims.

  ‘I’ve been doing a little backgrounding on the other matter,’ he says.

  ‘The listing of the remnant?’

  ‘Yes. But it is Science, you understand … my contacts there are limited …’

  Armistead is being falsely humble. He sits at the centre of a labyrinth of connections within the university and beyond, his life devoted to the battles which rage between faculties and within them, between teaching staff and administration. He is the unquestioned master, minatory and ruthless, rarely, if ever, losing a fight, accumulating advantage in every corridor.

  ‘As we thought,’ Armistead says, ‘an application was lodged with what used to be called DERM – I’m afraid I can’t help you with the new name, it’s unpronounceable, although still vaguely connected with resource management – to have the whole riparian strip within the dam site listed.’

  ‘But that’s nonsense,’ Guy says. ‘Ninety-eight per cent of it’s been planted over the last twenty years. You can’t go classifying that as rare and endangered, or even threatened. And anyway, I thought there was some chance of delisting the original remnant, or at least re-classifying it.’

  There’s a small bit of remnant rainforest within the dam site. At some previous time it has been listed under the Vegetation Management Act. The assumption has been that it would be deemed insignificant, small enough that it could be ignored or offset with plantings elsewhere. If, however, the new plantings are to be included then real problems might arise.

  ‘Not my field,’ Armistead says gently, chidingly.

  Lamprey waits.

  ‘But, here’s the thing,’ Armistead says. ‘It seems the application wasn’t properly prepared – some technical issue with the process, you understand, not the content. They’ve made a case, as I understand it, that because it all comes from seed gathered within the remnant it represents existing vegetation, of which there’s only a tiny amount in the larger catchment. Something like that. It’s apparently seen as a good argument.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, the application hasn’t yet been progressed.’ Taking off the half glasses again to clean them with plump fingers. ‘As you know funding’s tight everywhere, and the application for extension of the area is not exactly the most popular document on the government’s radar right now. There’s a process.’

  ‘There’s always a process.’

  ‘Indeed. In this case it’s been referred to a junior officer for attention. It’ll be his job to return it to the applicant to fix up the problems. As it happens I have some connections to this particular department. The supervisor is seeking funding for a project, and would appreciate my backing.’ He gives the smallest of smiles. ‘It seems possible the return of the application might be delayed, even beyond the time limit for submissions to the environmental impact statement.’

  ‘And there’s no paper trail, no emails?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘Good man, Armistead. Good man. I really do owe you one this time,’ Guy says.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Armistead says, brushing the praise aside with the nonchalance of one who knows his own worth.

  Guy gets up. Now that he’s finished he can’t wait to get out of the place. Whenever he sees Armistead the thought comes involuntarily to mind that there but for the grace of God …

  Armistead, however, is not yet prepared to let him go. ‘You’re spending a bit of time with Aldous Bain these days, I understand,’ he says.

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on, Armistead.’

  ‘It’s just a little thing.’ The fat man looks up at him. ‘I had a bit to do with him years ago. We were in Sydney together, just after I moved. I always thought him an unpleasant chap. Didn’t mind the occasional use of muscle to get his own way. Never forgotten that.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. We were on the opposite side politically, that’s all.’

  ‘Aldous doesn’t strike me as the sort to get in a fight.’

  Armistead laughs at the possibility. ‘No, of course not. He had others do it for him, even then.’

  There’s a four-wheel drive parked out the front when he gets home. Nick Lasker on the couch, jumping up to shake his hand. A couple of piles of stapled-together sheets of paper on the coffee table beside a glass of water. Helen across from him, if anything more reduced than he remembers from the last time he saw her, which had surely been only the evening before. Perhaps it’s just that she’s in someone else’s company, allowing him, for an instant, to see her as she is, so frail that even to be sitting, propped up amongst cushions, seems unlikely. No visible means of support.

  ‘Sit with us a minute,’ she says. ‘Have you got the time?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You had a pleasant coffee? Did you see anyone?’

  She assumes he’s been in town, knows nothing about his trip to the university. Probably best to keep it that way.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Did you get my pills?’

  ‘No. No, I didn’t. I’ll go back in again later. I was distracted. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Not to worry, darling, I still have some.’

  The use of the endearment sounding odd, not just because her voice is so weak.

  ‘Doctor Lasker’s here to talk to me about my tests,’ she says, directing him towards Nick.

  ‘So, Doctor,’ he says, ‘I hope everything’s looking good?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing, darling,’ she says, ‘it’s not. Not at all.’

  The problem had been the intensity of the light. After living in London for so long he’d forgotten how exceptional it was; the different levels of colour.

  He’d been travelling for what seemed like days: London, Ankara, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Darwin, Sydney, the stops in Asia dream-like affairs, the plane doors opening to hot heavy midnight air, damp and redolent of aeroplane fuel and partly treated sewage, clove cigarettes, the passengers hustled across the tarmac in the darkness to transit lounges boasting a single bamboo-faced bar and closed gift shops, while small brown men with thick moustaches mopped floors under the supervision of soldiers with machine guns strapped across their chests. The cleaners, it was understood, earning so little that they might mop for several lifetimes and never earn enough for the privilege of a single seat on the great silver plane that was ferrying him across the world towards the lover who’d said she wanted to be alone, but whose wishes he was ignoring because that was what a man who loved a woman did. A man like him, repentant, who had waited in London for the requisite number of miserable uncommunicative weeks, unable to write anything lucid or even coherent. A man who’d got on a plane and followed her right around the world. To Sydney and a change of terminals, a connecting flight to Brisbane, followed by an indeterminate journey on a rattling train from the ill-named Roma Street Station to somewhere whose name he couldn’t even recall but from where he’d finally taken a taxi, costing almost as much as the domestic flight, to this place which didn’t seem to
be a place at all, just a conglomeration of bungalows huddled together on a wide flat plain behind the dunes, separated one from another by tall paling fences, their roofs festooned with television aerials that mocked the serried white trunks of the paperbarks in the distance, the remnant of coastal forest which, it seemed likely, the whole ugly tile-roofed mess had replaced. The taxi finding its way along neatly kerbed and guttered streets to another of these squat brick homes with its roll-a-door garage, it’s aluminium boat on a trailer parked in the double driveway. Important, in the face of suburbs like this, to remember that there is no such thing as normal, that all human beings are, as Anthony Powell would have it, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies – all people are equally extraordinary – except he couldn’t help but think it would be easier to imagine the lives of airport cleaners in Ankara than what occurred in the lounge rooms hidden behind these venetian blinds. Hardly a promising place, this suburb in the provinces of a province at the bottom of the world, in a country he’d thought to have left behind. He, Guy Lamprey, having come back to stand at the ripple-glass door and ring the bell; she, Helen, answering it and finding him there, coming wordlessly into his arms.

  Explanations were required. She took him down the short length of street to a thin strip of bush which, when traversed, abruptly, suddenly, astonishingly, revealed the sea. Stepping out of the low scrub into vastness, terrible brightness, the Pacific rolling its waves onto an endless beach, one of those beaches which stretch to the north and to the south without interruption, without headland or bay, one single interminable strip that lost itself in either direction to sea mist, the tide high so that they were obliged to walk in the soft sand up near the low dunes, coming apart and together on the uneven surface, the waves around their ankles, pushing them up the slope with heavy runs of foam. He there in body alone, large bits of him still trapped in those midnight stops, in the long hours in the back of the smoky plane wondering if he was doing the correct thing, when the certainty he’d felt buying the ticket had been lost in that curious plastic limbo, and yet required to be here now, this was the point, called on to come into presence, here on the glaring beach, to deliver the message that must be communicated to this woman with the long straight hair blowing in her face who he loved but who’d been sent away from him by what he had done, who, it seemed possible, might still love him, this woman, here, in her rolled up jeans and her white blouse, appearing, extraordinarily, as in a continuum with that person he’d last seen in the hallway weeks ago. Never mind that she was tanned, radiantly healthy now, she was no less separate from him, regardless that her lips, when they’d kissed in the doorway, had been so full of longing.

  ‘I’ve come to get you,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to do whatever it is I need to do to get you back. I want you to come home with me. I need you. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for what happened.’

  Prepared, now, at last, to come clean if necessary, if that was what it took, to tell her everything that had happened in Venice.

  She with other ideas in mind, squeezing his hand.

  ‘What if I said I don’t want to go back there?’ she said.

  ‘You mean you won’t come back with me?’

  ‘No, I mean, what if I wanted to stay here, in Australia? What if being with me involved staying here?’

  ‘Here?’

  Stunned by the enormity of the suggestion. This was nowhere. He looked along the beach and down at the sand, coarse-grained, golden-brown, the tips of the waves lapping their footprints, rendering them smooth-edged, ephemeral, the heavy sand absorbing the water as quickly as it arrived. At least, he thought, it was sand, not pebbles, not grey and bleak, and, for all the houses hidden behind the dunes, there were few people around, only a couple of surfers out amongst the waves.

  ‘I want to be with you,’ he said, the momentum of his journey carrying him forward. ‘If that means being here, then that’s what it means.’

  ‘I don’t want you to say you’ll live somewhere with me out of a sense of guilt.’

  ‘It’s not guilt,’ he said. ‘It’s recognition. I need you. I don’t think I’ve ever needed anyone before. Not like this.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I like that.’

  They walked on. Every few hundred metres the scrub along the top of the dunes was punctuated by a set of wooden steps and a numbered sign, the latter, he supposed, a way of identifying where they were. So that if a swimmer or one of the surfers got into trouble they could call for help. But to whom would they call? Where might help come from?

  ‘I wouldn’t ask you to live down here,’ she said. ‘This is awful. I’m just here because it’s where Mum and Dad have moved. There’s better places, up in the hills. We could live there. D’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m lost here. You’ll have to show me.’

  ‘But do you want to? I mean, really? That’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Turning to him, taking his hands in hers. The wind blowing her hair back from her face, spreading her shirt tight against her breasts, the cloth sharply white next to her skin.

  ‘I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed you, terribly. I don’t care about Venice.’ Pausing. ‘As long as you promise it won’t happen again. I’m pregnant, you see,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have our baby.’

  eleven

  Will

  Jaz comes in the sleep-out and wakes him, Swell’s up, he says, You wanna catch some waves? It’s still dark. Four in the morning for fuck’s sake. Sometimes it seems like Jaz never sleeps, you can find him out on the veranda any time of night, wrapped in a blanket, just sitting there, staring out into the darkness.

  Who’s he to say no?

  They go down the coast in the ute, just the two of them, Will driving, Jaz beside him in the dark, nobody talking, barely a word spoken. The motorway empty but still lit from end to end. At the headland there’s just a smudge of light on the horizon, picking up the underside of a line of cumulus hanging over the edge of the world; cold, too, getting their wetties on in the park, paddling out into the dawn.

  The sea’s glassy grey, just a skerrick of wind coming in from the west, the tide out, almost on the turn, swell to about a metre rising up in these wicked fucking arcs, feathering along the tops. They catch a couple while the streetlights are still shining on Aerodrome Road and in amongst the houses on the hill and they’re alone out there amongst these near perfect waves, letting their boards slide down the silk of their forward edge, cutting into the moving cliff, always new, infinitely repetitive for whatever it is, a minute, maybe ninety seconds at a time.

  Out the back, as the sun’s coming up, they sit for a while. Will’s no idea why Jaz’s chosen him to take for a surf, why anything really. But then that’s the way it is most of the time.

  ‘This is what it’s about for me,’ Jaz says. ‘Out here like this.’

  Will nods.

  Jaz’s head is all but shaved, he runs a number three over it every couple of days. Sitting there in the ocean with his great neck rising out of his wetsuit he looks like some kind of sea creature, a bull seal maybe, his face full of lines of shadow. Will’s not of a mind to say anything but now the silence has been broken, he gets the sense more’s to come. It’s not a good feeling. It’s similar to how he felt as a boy when his dad was about to tell him all the ways he was failing to be the kind of person he ought to be. In the days when he gave a fuck what his father thought.

  ‘Don’t know if I’ve told you this,’ Jaz says, eventually, ‘but when you’re doing your training for the special forces they give you this exercise. Right at the end. You’ve been doing this arduous shit for months, running up hills with your packs, crawling through mud, close use of firearms … you name it. All these other blokes have fallen away and you’re wondering if you’re going to make it, then, last of all, they send you out bush by yourself. They drop you off in the middle of no
where and you’ve got to make it on your own. It’s the toughest thing. Not the surviving part. That’s hard, but you’ve been trained for it. It’s the bit about being by yourself. Nobody knowing what you do or how you do it or giving a shit. Doing what needs to be done because it needs doing. Just you in real time. That’s the bit that breaks blokes. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.

  ‘Here’s the thing, but. There’s harder stuff to come,’ he says. ‘There’s coming back when you’ve done your time.’

  Turning to look at Will, as if he sees right into him, into the darker parts nobody ought to see and it is like it was with his father in one way but in another it couldn’t be more different because even though Jaz sees him he’s not judging him. It’s raw but there’s no shame in it.

  ‘But there’s the lesson, my friend: sometimes you have to go low. You can’t find something you don’t know till you get to the place where you know nothing, that’s the truth of it, you got to go where you’re empty, where there’s nothing left. You have to make space in yourself if you want to hear the voice in the wilderness. When Isaiah said, make straight in the desert a highway for God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every hill made low, he wasn’t talking about hills and valleys, he was talking about what’s happening inside you, right now.’

  Jaz’s God stuff can be awkward. No shit. It comes up every now and then at The House and when it does it’s, like, you don’t know where to look. This morning, though, out behind the waves, the sun sending beams of light from those low clouds, one on one, it’s personal, direct, it’s coming straight from Jaz to him and it lifts the hair on the back of his neck. The words get under his skin.

  God has never interested Will. He’s not like Jaz. He’s never thought too much about it. At least until now. Now he doesn’t know what to think. Now it’s coming at him from all sides. Ange is into spiritual stuff. She’s into all of it, astrology, numerology, the I Ching, tantra, reiki, runes, chakras, The Power of Now. There’s not a thing she does in the day that’s not governed by something. But she won’t have a bar of religion. Organised religion is just that, she says, angry about it. Organised. Small men holding onto tiny fucking bits of power. Fiddling about with people’s lives. It’s about them, not spirituality.