Hinterland
Page 21
Will doesn’t know what to say to either of them. He’s not good with people and how they fit together. Never has been. It was one of the things he liked about the army: these things were already decided, you did what this person said, that person did what you said. Even then it could be hard. Machines are more his style. At the heart of a machine is always something he can understand. The first engine he ever stripped down was a red Holden HR 186. He was fifteen. He took it right to the big end, laid it bare so you could see how it worked. The way the pistons at the centre got pushed down when the fuel ignited, causing the crankshaft to turn, and – here was the thing – this movement rotated the camshaft, which lifted one set of valves to let out the spent gasses and another set of valves to let the new fuel in, and because it was all connected, meshed together by cogs, it happened perfectly in time, exactly when it was supposed to. You could even run more things off the same shaft, alternators, fuel and oil pumps, the cooling system. Everything the engine needed being driven by the engine itself. Something wonderfully clean about that, you could almost see the possibility of it doing it without the need for any other input, if you could only get things to work perfectly. You could also see why that couldn’t happen, the wear of parts against each other and the weight of the car, all that, but the idea was there. This was where life failed him; too much friction, people rubbing up against each other. You couldn’t fix things by making a small adjustment here or there.
The trouble with Ange is that she talks all the time, there’s a kind of endless stream of words pouring out of her, like there’s no barrier between what’s happening in her mind and what comes out of her mouth; important stuff about her mum spilling out with the same force as her worry about where she’s put her phone. It flows this way and that so as he can’t make any sense of it and after a while he blocks it out even though he knows that’s wrong, it’s not right to have to ignore her, it’s just like it’s the price he has to pay to be around her, to have her every now and then give herself over to him, which is when all his pain goes away, when it seems like there’s some kind of hope.
Jaz points towards the beach, towards the early traffic that’s picking up on the road, the houses stepping up the hill, the high-rises to the south, that sea creature’s face deeply mournful. ‘See this place,’ he says, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘A land of Godless fucking multitudes. I mean it. People gone soft, wasting away, turned by the media to believing shit about peace and love and the happiness that comes from buying crap, just at the exact moment in history when we need strong men who’ll stand up for what they believe and say fucking enough, man. You ask these cunts what they believe in, they’ll say nothing. They’ll say exactly that, nothing, like they’re proud of it. That’s where their education’s gotten them, pride in themselves over the top of the fucking majesty of something like this.’ Spreading his arms out to encompass the waves around them, spouting more scripture, ‘Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with a span, comprehended the dust of the earth?’
Which is just about too much for Will. One quote from the fucking Bible at dawn being enough. Time to fuck off out of there. But then Jaz turns it around.
‘Listen, I don’t expect you to get this stuff about God. I’m talking about myself. I was the crooked way made straight. Maybe you are too. But that doesn’t worry me. You can take it or leave it. But I tell you this: there’s a change coming. Any fool can see it, the earth is defiled, its inhabitants have broken the covenant, and what I’m saying is there’s a cost to that and we need to be prepared for when the bill gets served. This training we’re doing at The House, it’s not for us. We’re part of something bigger. We’re preparing to be called upon, when the time’s right. The question is, Will,’ Jaz says, ‘are you with us? That’s what I’m asking you. Is this something you want to be part of?’
At any other time there’d be no question. Even with the religion thrown in Will would jump at it, if only because, at The House, with these blokes, training with them, pushing themselves to the limit, there’s a clarity that’s been missing for a long time. It’s like being back in the army but better because it’s men working out together because they want to, not because they’re told to. There’s something larger out there and he’s part of it, doesn’t matter so much even what it is. He’s starting to feel good about himself. It’s not that the anger’s gone away, it’s still there, only focused now, channelled.
At the same time, but, it’s tied up with Ange. The two things have happened together and they go in different directions, not just the things they talk about at the camp, the political shit they all fucking believe, but also Ange herself. She’s in and out all the time. It’s like as soon as she shuts up for just a minute and goes in with him, dives into whatever it is that happens between them, it’s all good. Everything that’s gone on since the last time, all the wrong words, wrong thoughts, wrong actions, gets wiped clean. They go to this place where it’s all new again. But when they come back up to the surface it’s like she has to push him away, as if she wants it but can’t handle it when she gets it. She turns on him, makes him the cause of all their problems. It’s driving him crazy. It’s making him so he doesn’t know who or where he is, like he’s being blown this way and that. Like Jaz says, he’s being stripped of everything he knows, down to a place where it’s all laid bare. No way to put it back together. None that he can see.
Still, going back up the hill in the ute with Jaz, the boards in the back, he says yes. Damo and Ren are in it too, and these are serious guys.
That’s good then, Jaz tells him, because he has a little project coming up. Nothing glamorous, mind, but something Will’s already been a part of.
‘See all these fuckers who’ve come to live here, taking your land, making up laws on what you can and can’t do in your own place? This’s a way to get back at them. Even up the score.’
twelve
Eugenie
She went to him. There was no use trying to see it any other way. After pouring herself down his stairs and back into her car, liquid with desire, trailing the headlights out through the darkness along the ridges, one hand on the wheel, the other pressed against her lower belly as if to stem the flow from a wound, she had lasted less than forty-eight hours.
The first time she did no more than go to his house. Dropped the girls at their grandmother’s, at her motherin-law’s house, if you please, and drove towards him in a light cotton dress, redolent with glorious disassociation, a shivering need, concentrating on getting there like some devotee whose practice depended upon holding to only one thing lest all else dissolve around her, refusing, even, to entertain thought about what might happen when she arrived, when she went up those stairs into the house and stood, where she’d been before, at the end of the formica bench, and he poured her cold white wine in a fragile glass and she drank the first bitter sip, cool and delicious on her tongue and he kissed her, not waiting, because they had, in truth, waited long enough, these last two days the most drawn-out foreplay she could imagine, holding him against her, only the thin cloth of her dress between her skin and him, his lips on her neck, his hands on her thighs, sliding up under the soft cotton and onto her buttocks, cupping her there, pulling her against him, lifting her onto the bench so he could kiss her more and then, without words, carry her, bare legs wrapped around his waist, through to the bedroom, not letting go of him, not knowing anymore if this was what she wanted, if this was who she was, if this man was right or wrong, simply lost to the pull of the moment, the imperative of her body. Which was not to say that thought had ceased, had eased or desisted; thought was still working, perhaps even harder than usual, spinning like a mad dervish behind her eyes, it was just that these sensations were stronger than its furious machinations, only the most lucid permutations penetrating to consciousness amid the smell of him, the hard thinness of his body, so much smaller than David in the chest and waist. Noting how they kissed, how sweetly, seductively, he
lifted her dress up and over her head, leaving her naked but for a brief pair of knickers and them not for long, wondering how many times he’d done this with women in this room, wondering who she was competing with, how good she needed to be, to look, undoing the buttons on his shirt, his belt, his trousers, driving the dervish back into the furthest corner of her mind, letting her skin talk directly to his skin for just one moment, desperate for that most basic of communications. The constrained force of her desire being inexplicably consummated by a sense of homecoming at the instant when he entered her, as if all the weeks and days and hours since they met in the observation room at the hospital had been pointed directly at this place, where it might be possible, at last, to let go, to open up, free from the bonds of a normal life, exposed without mediation to what lies beneath.
The second time they drove together to the coast. It was raining on the Range. She parked her car in the hospital car park as if she was going to work except, instead of turning towards the building, she raised her umbrella and walked, as if she had all the right in the world to do so, out to the street and into the passenger seat of his waiting car. Shaking the drops from the umbrella and folding it into the gap between her seat and the door, arranging her dress, patting it down, a woman in her late-thirties on an assignation with her lover, frighteningly naked beneath the cloth, although not yet ready for him to know that. Going around the business district on back streets to avoid encountering anyone and then out of town, heading north along the switchback road behind the shield of the windscreen wipers, taking one of the smaller winding routes off the escarpment and coming, thus, out from beneath the cloud. Pulling over into a road maintenance site on the side of the hill, lantana tumbling over the steep cut edges of sub-soil, filling the humid air with its scent. Stopping the car because, he said, he couldn’t bear to go any further without kissing her; parking, like adolescents, in this spot with its view out to sea where the big yellow machines sorted dirt, oblivious to the possibility of discovery because the force of their need for each other would, they understood, protect them. This was the thing, it wasn’t just while they were having sex that her life was transformed, it was at all times; the simple fact of being desired and of desiring changed everything, brought to the world a new intensity of light and colour, exposed a larger and more benign pattern within the surface of things.
The sun out down on the coast. Hot. Humidity high.
The restaurant he took her to was in a kind of pavilion perched out in a tea-coloured lake, the table by the rail, a light breeze coming across the water to them, chasing small dislocations in the reflections of the old paperbarks that leant out from the edge to drink; condensation misting their glasses, forming under its own weight small rivulets, the food coming in little parcels, each one a delicacy. Nick across the table from her, alert to her every movement, his knee brushing hers, the formality of the situation requiring that this time they actually speak to each other. Shared geography being, at least, a starting point, a fundamental commonality which might serve to justify the force of their meeting, but also a way into their individual history, the long line of events which had brought them to where they sat.
He told her about his family, about his older brother, about being designated as the smart one, being sent to the selective high school and from there, on a scholarship, to university and how, after that, there had never been a moment, really, when there might have been time to question his progress towards being a doctor, only this extraordinary exacting training for situations that no amount of training might prepare you for, so much coming at you so hard for so long that the only thing to do was to face each event as it presented, which was how he’d found himself years later behind a desk in a small windowless room, only his laptop and a pen-holder provided by big pharma for company, listening to the complaints of others, married with children and having affairs, only seeing the patterns in his life when it was far too late. A story which led to her own reflections on childhood, on how, after Yvette had died, when her mother took herself off to India, to Poona, to get in contact with her grief, and from there into hard drugs, and her father went back to France at the behest of the Australian government, she’d gone to live with her grandparents down the road from where, it turned out, Nick was living. Curious, she said, to hear him talk about his childhood there, how, for him, the suburb had been so small, enshrined by the narrowness of its viewpoints, its working-class know-your-place mentality, somewhere to escape from, whereas for her, parachuted into it as an eight-year-old, it had been enormous, all consuming. But then, of course, she had been a small child, carrying her grief which was the small grief of a child and therefore hardly worthy of notice. She did not say that. Or only some of it, before he picked up on her comments about the nature of inner-west suburbs of Sydney and went off on some tangent about that, while she looked down into the brown water at the tiny fish playing around the pylons of the building and thought, no longer listening, thought perhaps even for the first time in her life about how she had, of necessity, swallowed that world whole, every bit of it. Donning the school uniform, eating the meals of meat and three veg, watching the sitcoms and soaps on the television that her classmates watched until she was as familiar with the characters as they were, making sure her white knee-socks were straight, her shoes polished. Studying the other girls as much as the curriculum for clues as to what it meant to be normal; working on herself to become that with a fierce and unforgiving purpose, in the hope that if she could somehow do it well enough then her glaring differences – to have been unfortunate enough to be raised as a hippie in the backblocks of rural New South Wales; to have been careless enough to have lost a sister, a mother and a father all at the same time – wouldn’t be noticeable. But, more than that, if she did achieve normal, if she was especially good, some small part of what had been taken might be given back. A grain of that in her mind, just a little thought in a little brain, but the kind of thing that can set, like with crystals, the pattern for what follows.
In the national park they took the inland track, wanting privacy, walking together on hard-packed sand amid the ti-tree and scribbly gums behind the headland, following the path through groves of paperbarks where tiny red-browed finches darted amongst leaves of spiky grass. Always the sound of the sea as a low note in the distance. Walking, fingers entwined, through scent of salt and bark and leaf. This being one of her most favourite places, where she went when she needed to find herself, to ground herself in life. Inviting him into her place.
‘I think it’s important to choose where you live,’ she said. ‘I mean, I don’t think it’s random. We have this idea we can live anywhere, that we make the choice, but it’s not true, there are places that are for you and places that aren’t. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. The only way to know is to listen.’ Wondering if he agreed with that, or thought it was new-age nonsense, wanting to go on and qualify it with stuff about Aboriginal connection to land, the whole philosophical argument that Lindl liked to lay out to justify what was, after all, just a feeling – Lindl, who was the least hippieish of anyone she’d ever met – but holding back from speaking because the magic of the small forest, its tops blown westward by the coastal winds, its branches tightly woven by those same forces, could, she thought, speak for itself. Stopping, once, to lie off to the side of the path amid fox-tail fern and fallen leaves, to look up through fine casuarina needles at the perfect sky. Lying within the creel of his legs, her head on his chest, conscious, how might she not be, of his hardness beneath the cloth, against her breasts, warmed by it but unconcerned, his hands in her hair, gently mussing it, large man’s hands pushing their fingers through her thick unruly mane, nothing simple here and yet no other way to be, coming home with him when home is not a narrow concrete-edged suburban street of red-tile-roofed bungalows but somewhere wilder, somewhere before all that, a place like this, a place of air and light and continuous sound, a place where the boundaries between herself and another might, just for
one brief instant of time, be thinner, more porous. His heartbeat beneath his skin. Her ear against his chest and that sound is him, her on him, his heart slowing, finding its own solid extraordinary rhythm while somewhere above the wattle birds bark out their curious cries.
She had, of necessity, forbidden him to visit, to even text unless she had first texted him. On account of the children and David, the latter due home any day. The very existence of a lover a secret from everyone, even Lindl. On the way back from the coast, in the car, he’d asked her about her husband. That was, she thought, when the real betrayal began, when she spoke to the man she was fucking in cars and forests about the aridity of her marriage.
The third time she went to see him she arrived with only the briefest of warnings. There was an anti-dam meeting scheduled for the late afternoon at the Alterbar. She arranged for the girls to walk into town after school, she’d pick them up from her father’s house after dinner. But when she met Marcus in the café it seemed at the last minute several people weren’t able to make it. They would have to cancel.
The two of them sat together for half an hour, drinking cheap red from expensive glasses, chatting. Marcus didn’t want the time to be wasted, he wanted to catch up on aspects of the campaign, but the conversation very quickly degenerated, as it so often did, into commentary on those involved, in this case Geoff Steever.
‘The truth of the matter,’ Marcus said, ‘is that he didn’t like our stunt down in Brisbane. You scratch the surface with Geoff and there’s a Tory lurking beneath. Doesn’t like all this nonsense. It’s not his wife who’s kept him from coming … I’ve spent the last hour talking him down … he told me he doesn’t think he can be part of the group anymore if we’re going to go on like that. His interest’s in pure research.’