Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it occurs to me that my whole involvement with the anti-dam campaign has been a ruse, a way of untying my marriage by default. Perhaps David’s been wise to it since the beginning. That’s why he’s been so pissed off about it.’

  ‘You don’t think,’ Lindl said, ‘this has all just been stirred up by seeing your doctor?’

  ‘Of course it has,’ she said, a bit testily, surprised at the obtuseness of the question, as if Lindl hadn’t been listening. ‘But that’s not the point.’

  Lindl remaining frustratingly calm. ‘So what is the point?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m talking to you. Maybe I need a room like this to sit in. Maybe if I had a room like this I’d have space to think.’ Petulant. Still having not quite dispensed with the idea that her friend might not be as good at listening as she was.

  ‘I’m not being facetious,’ Lindl said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to support you in whatever you do. I mean it. If you need a place to stay, if you need help of any kind, I’m here.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I’m worried how David’s going to react. He’ll see it as you going off with another man. His pride will be hurt.’

  ‘And I should protect him from that?’

  ‘Maybe. Would that be a crime against your new-found honesty?’

  ‘I don’t want to lie to him. I might not want to be married to him anymore but it doesn’t mean I want to lie.’

  Lindl let that hang. Eugenie looked out the open doors, down across the paddock. There was a fence about five metres away to keep the cattle from getting in around the building. Someone, probably Marcus, had mowed the grass inside. The same brown cows from the other day, or ones like them, Brahman-cross, were dotted around the paddock beyond, flicking their giant ears, swishing their long tails, eating grass. Ruminants. You could see why someone might think them sacred.

  ‘What do you think about here?’ she asked.

  ‘Stuff.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  ‘We’re talking about you,’ Lindl said, refusing to be drawn. ‘It’s not that I want to protect David, or men in general for that matter, so much as protect my friend from the way they behave when they get hurt. But you’re right, it was a silly idea. I’m sorry. I was just thinking it might be better to avoid provoking him, to let him down gently. For your own sake, for the sake of the girls. But of course you need to be honest.’

  ‘You think it’s all right to leave?’ Eugenie said. Still apparently seeking permission.

  ‘If you’re asking my opinion I think you’re already gone,’ Lindl said. ‘You were gone when I spoke to you the other day. It’s just a matter of how you go about it. And I meant what I said before, about staying here if you need to.’

  Tears threatening to well at that. Looking down at the floor to hide it.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ Eugenie said. ‘That’s what this is about.’

  ‘I know,’ Lindl said.

  They sat. The cows ruminated. The studio had been renovated but the slab floor retained the pattern of its previous use as a dairy. Rough herring-bone indentations sloped towards the doors.

  ‘In the interest of honest disclosure,’ Lindl said, not looking at Eugenie, ‘what I think about when I sit here is mostly Mum. And my family. It’s not entirely healthy.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘My thoughts. They take me down fairly grim pathways. Our capacity for violence. I’d say men’s capacity for violence but unfortunately I don’t believe it’s just them. They’re just the agents of it. The convenient scapegoat.’

  ‘You don’t mean Marcus?’

  ‘No! No, Marcus is one of the good ones. I’m worried for him, not by him.’

  Eugenie waited. Lindl threw up her hands in frustration.

  ‘Some days I wake with this awful sense of foreboding. Everyone must feel like it some time, I suppose. People must have felt this way all through history. In worse times than this. That’s what I tell myself, but it doesn’t really help. I feel it now. At a time when the world most needs to come together in some way, to get over all our petty little hates, we seem instead to be making a great lurch to the Right. Not just in Australia, everywhere.

  ‘Marcus has this idea that it’s time for good men to stand up for what they believe in. You’ve heard him. Spouting his Margaret Meady stuff: never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world, the kind of thing you find on the back of toilet doors. The thing about this shit is that it’s true, small groups have and do change the world, but the story that doesn’t get told is of the millions who fall by the wayside in the process, whose efforts have no effect at all. Who die for nothing. Unremarked, unremembered.’

  Eugenie watching.

  ‘What I think is that sooner or later the bullies will shake off their fine suits and start killing people, the way they always have. And they’ll start with people like Marcus. I don’t think it’s the right time for good men to stand up.’

  Lapsing into silence.

  Eugenie shocked at the force of the outburst. Wondering how to talk her out of this stuff. If it was even her role to do so. Wondering if perhaps Lindl wasn’t the one who needed help, by which she meant medication. The nurse in her rising to the occasion. Whether or not one of the amitriptylines might be indicated. Feeling guilty because she, as her friend, hadn’t noticed, had been caught up in her own soap opera, her game of doctors and nurses. Wondering what she was doing bringing her problems to Lindl to sort out.

  ‘It’s why I’m so big on planting trees,’ Lindl said, and laughed. ‘It grounds me, stops me going down these spirals. Unless of course I think about these arseholes who want to destroy it all.’ She laughed again, an even more hollow attempt than the previous one. ‘But we were talking about you, weren’t we?’ Pulling herself up, no irony apparent. ‘When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s the truth of the matter. A funny thing, though. I was astonished when you said your man was the new doctor. Ian told me something about him yesterday.’

  ‘Yes?’ Noting the way her whole mind swung into focus at the very mention of Nick, suggesting she wasn’t as indifferent to him as she might have wished.

  ‘I can’t remember how we got onto the subject but he was telling me about a dinner he’d had with Guy and Helen Lamprey a few weeks ago. Your doctor was there. It seems he’s one of Guy’s special friends.’

  thirteen

  Nick

  Joy, the office manager, is a formidable woman. Nick’s been a GP long enough to understand that a practice cannot run without an efficient front desk but he’s never encountered anyone like her. Of a certain age and substantial girth, she organises the office according to her own established rules, immune, it seems, to his charms (but then the same might be said of him regarding her, this being one of the things Nick has never quite grasped about other people). They have inherited each other and make the best of things, but there is little warmth in their interactions, he knows nothing of her life outside the office, a failing which he recognises is part of the problem, but hardly knows how to rectify. A question about the photo of the young man on the desk at this late stage would only emphasise his previous disinterest. Regardless of her age she is no slouch with technology, updating the system, the calendars, patients’ records, referrals, requisition orders for supplies, all without fault or apparent difficulty, while at the same time managing appointments, payments, accounts, the many different health-fund and government requirements, and, even more extraordinarily, getting these things to appear on his computer at will. She can even get a network to speak to a printer.

  He does not presume to enter her space; handing patient folders through the door or over the counter, from where they are sorted into various trays, the very obvious In and Out, but also Pending, a series of open-top drawers each one further labelled with her name, as if to distinguish them from someone else’s trays, so th
at there is Joy In, Joy Out, Joy Pending, the latter bringing him up short each of the twenty times a day he encounters it, as if the phrase sums up some central aspect of his life. He had thought, during those few days when he was seeing Eugenie, that joy had, in fact, arrived, that this last year had indeed been a kind of pending, a preparation for the actual moment. Now she refuses to communicate with him. No explanation given. It is possible the husband, David, returned unannounced from the mines. He imagines a thick-set individual, broad-shouldered, receding jet black hair cut very short, dark eyebrows and a three-day growth, tattoos on bicep and shoulder, dressed, of course, in hi-viz yellow and dark blue; clothes that she, Eugenie, will wash for him and hang on the Hills Hoist in the garden while, according to the little he does actually know about the man, David watches sport in a lounge room that he, Nick, hasn’t ever seen and now, apparently, never will.

  being the only message he has received in reply to the raft of texts he has sent and left for her, each one of which were, in turn, responding to a text announcing she would shortly be arriving at his home to ravish him, a promise she didn’t keep or even cancel, and which – though it was impossible she could know this – he wouldn’t have been able to entertain no matter how much he might have wanted to because he was at the time, of course, fucking Nina, although in his defence he would say that this had not been intentional, he had invited Nina to visit for the express purpose of telling her they could no longer continue their occasional liaisons because he’d met somebody. News which Nina had taken with her customary ease, albeit with an attempt to get out of him who the person was, aided and abetted by a series of kisses which degenerated into the act itself. Nina, he supposed, determined to exercise her rights at least one more time as a statement of ownership or, perhaps, a way of saving face, and he being helpless to resist not because he was, in fact, helpless, but rather hopeless, lacking any means to say no to a woman in such a circumstance, lest he give offence.

  The difficulty – coming into the surgery an hour early, finding he is even ahead of Joy, and that she must have cleaned up before going home the previous night even though it was a late session, the prep room immaculate, the magazines in neat stacks on the waiting-room table, her Far Side Page-a-Day Cartoon Calendar turned over to the new day – the trouble is that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t think straight outside of a consultation and only within one because the process is so deeply ingrained that the protocols initiate themselves automatically. Gnawing at the possibilities, fighting away the awful intuition that she had somehow found out about Nina and wasn’t interested in hearing his explanation, should an opportunity to provide one occur; they weren’t, after all, in a relationship, there’d never been any discussion about not sleeping with anyone else, and yet, even at the time, he’d known it as a kind of betrayal. If she was just another woman, another in the long series he’d engaged with over the previous twenty years, it wouldn’t matter, but Eugenie had never once fallen into that category. Now, he fears, he has become an object of her scorn.

  He goes into his office, which is the same one he took on arrival, several months before, puts the laptop on his desk, plugs the various leads into their ports. Nick has always worked for someone else, a medical centre or a private practice, never as his own man. He needs to come to a decision soon about what is happening in Winderran. Miles’s rooms, down the end of the corridor, much nicer than his own, remain unoccupied, just as they were when he died, like a rebuke.

  His former employer had no heirs and the ownership of the practice is caught in a legal limbo, but it seems possible Nick might be able to take it over as a going concern, with a locum of his own, or, who knows, another partner. He is tempted. Other than his children there is little enough back in Canberra. If he could figure out a way to negotiate with Abie so that he could see Josh and Danielle on a semi-regular basis the prospect of living in Winderran has a certain appeal; although that could just as easily be a result of his feelings for Eugenie. His connection to place always tenuous at best, bound up with the women in his life rather than any sense of country.

  His brother bringing to this topic a more venal point of view than Eugenie. He thinks taking on the practice would be a good investment. Nick went down to visit on the weekend in a misguided attempt to distract himself. Matt, sitting on a sun-lounge on his tiled patio, his belly proudly before him, explained, between sips of imported beer, that the market was depressed. ‘Down thirty per cent if it’s an inch,’ he said. ‘But it’ll come back and when it does, Winderran’s the sort of place you want to be. It won’t stop where it was before the crash, it’ll double again. As I live and breathe.’ Rattling off percentages like a psychotic calculator. His older brother, the one their father had thought useless, destined to end up sweeping the streets, now beyond simply rich, delighted to instruct his little brother on how to follow him on his path to infinite wealth. The motorboat at its mooring in the canal. As if it was as simple as that.

  ‘I don’t have a lot to invest,’ Nick said, not prepared to admit what he was paying Abie towards the mortgage on the house in Canberra, or, for that matter, what she’d think about the idea. Speaking of women’s scorn.

  ‘You haven’t heard of borrowing?’ Matt said. ‘Interest’s at historic lows. Someone like you … you’re the darling of the banks. You can’t go wrong. Jesus, did you see the people in that town? Last time we were up there you couldn’t move for tourists. I’m thinking of buying into the main street myself.’

  ‘You’re not worried about the global markets?’

  ‘Nicky. Everyone’s worried about the global markets. That’s what brings the prices down. That’s what’s going to make us all rich. What did they teach you at those fancy schools of yours?’

  ‘Clearly nothing. So you’re not worried?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying you take the opportunities you’re given. Eat, drink and be merry. For tomorrow we die.’

  ‘This,’ Nick said, ‘is your investment advice?’

  The computer sounds a triumphant chord as the screen lights up, his email box automatically filling with missives, many of which call out for attention. Unable to approach them he flicks to a news site but the headlines are all international doom and gloom: India’s battle with China over water. Not his business.

  He hears Joy come in, and, after giving her a moment to settle, goes out to say hello, only to find there’s already a patient in the waiting room, an alternate as they’re called locally, one of the latter-day hippies, but in this case female, young, barefoot, dressed in what looks like skins, as if she’s just wandered in from a teepee or a cave, none too clean, flicking through a woman’s magazine, brown unshaven legs stuck out in front of her.

  Joy offers to make coffee. He follows her to the little kitchen, standing in the doorway while she boils the kettle. She inclines her head towards the girl in the waiting room. ‘No appointment,’ she says. ‘If you want you can squeeze her in before your 8.45, otherwise you’re booked through till lunchtime.’

  ‘I was hoping to catch up on email. But I could. It’s not like I want to do that.’

  Joy gives him one of her looks, never keen to encourage skiving. ‘From the camp, I’d guess,’ she says.

  ‘Against the dam?’ he asks.

  She nods.

  ‘And you, Joy? Do you have a position?’ A conversational gambit. He may as well try.

  The kettle coming to the boil. She ladles several large spoonfuls of grounds into the plunger. If he does take over the practice he’ll get one of those things that makes coffee from capsules. They can afford it.

  ‘It’s a load of nonsense, if that’s what you’re asking,’ she says.

  ‘I thought you’d be for it.’

  The wrong thing to say. She leans on the plunger with her great tuck-shop arms, applying even more force than usual as a result of his faux pas, so that he
expects any second the thing will explode, spraying hot liquid across the room. He can hardly bear to look.

  ‘Why d’you say that?’

  He doesn’t know why. Because she’s a local, he supposes, but that, too, would be the wrong thing to say. He shrugs. ‘Never pays to make assumptions, does it?’ he says.

  ‘Right enough. Anyone with half a brain can see the whole idea was made up on the back of a cocktail napkin. This town’s future’s in tourism, it’s in looking after the place, not putting a useless dam in the middle of it.’ The plunger has survived her ministrations. She pours a couple of mugs of the hefty brew.

  ‘It’s not for me to speak about patients,’ she says, glancing up at him, ‘but that man Lamprey should know better. He’s always thought he was too good for this town, now he’s hell bent on destroying it. No excuse his wife’s sick.’

  ‘What’s he been doing?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Well I haven’t got time for it now,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Here’s your coffee. Shall I send the girl in?’

  ‘Give me five.’

  ‘Right you are. Mind, she could do with a bath.’