Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘What news?’

  ‘About the dam? Where the hell are you anyway?’

  ‘I’m back up in Brisbane, stuck in traffic on the Gateway.’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing there?’

  ‘It’s Helen …’

  ‘Listen, I haven’t got time for this. You’re supposed to be in training today. It’s organised. The people, the room, everything. I’ve got a media storm going on down here. I can’t fucking believe it. Some idiots have attacked a conservationist opposing the dam. Up your way. A woman. She’s been flown to Brisbane in a coma. Is this something to do with you? Did you tell them to do this?’

  The truck he’d been watching, a red Australia Post semi-trailer, way ahead in the queue, had begun to move.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

  ‘Well you should. Get on to it. Straight away. What the fuck are you doing up in Brisbane?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to tell you, Helen’s back in hospital, she was admitted last night. I’m on my way up there, from the airport. Except right now I’m at a standstill.’

  ‘Right. Hardly the best. Well, make use of the time. Make some calls. Find out what’s going on. Call me as soon as you learn something.’

  The radio cutting back in with a song from the seventies, the ancient strains of weeping pedal steel guitar winding out of the speakers in the same way as they had for the last forty years. Pressing the button to get rid of the fucking thing, bugger the traffic report. Unused to being spoken to like that. Bain’s indifference to the situation with Helen bringing his own response to the fore. Wondering if he had made the right decision in cancelling the scheduled meetings to rush back. If there was, in fact, any point. The absence of the doctor an unconscionable irritant; how could he make a rational judgement without being in possession of the facts? Was Helen really about to die? Bain’s displeasure stinging. It was, apart from anything else, unfair. If Bain’s concern was his public image, how much worse would it appear not to be at his wife’s bedside? How was he supposed to use the time effectively when he didn’t have any staff, wasn’t even a candidate yet, never mind elected? Trapped in the car.

  The phone again.

  This time his daughter. No, Hi Dad, how are you? Straight down to business our Sarah. ‘What’s happening with Mum? I tried to call the house but nobody answered.’

  He told her what little he’d got from the hospital.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked, her tone, even through the medium of a mobile phone connected wirelessly to the car radio still managing to convey her disdain at the idea he might be somewhere else than by her mother’s side. Getting it from all quarters.

  ‘Stuck in traffic, heading out of Brisbane. I had to go to Canberra yesterday.’

  ‘You had to go?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘You’ve always had your priorities,’ she said.

  Frustration winding up another notch. But then, if he’d expected sympathy he was speaking with the wrong person. Sarah, at thirty-two, was all tight-lipped efficiency and ruthless ambition. For what he was never sure. She had, it seemed, caught the Western Australian disease. Her allegiance solidly with Helen.

  Alan would have been thirty-five this year.

  The temptation to bite all but overwhelming. Restraining himself. Nothing to be gained by arguing with his daughter.

  ‘You’ll come over?’

  ‘I’m packing as we speak. I’ll catch a flight late afternoon. I’ll go straight from the office.’

  All right for her to have business to attend to.

  ‘You’ll be okay to get here from the airport?’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  Not sure why sarcasm was necessary. ‘I’ll see you then. Let me know when you’ll be arriving. I should be at the hospital in an hour or so.’

  One of the reasons he hadn’t lost control being that, mid-conversation, he’d been taken by the strangest sense that Helen was in the car with him. Right there in the passenger seat. Asking him to calm down. As if the sleepless night was telling on him. As if, in the space of a single phone call, he had bought into some crazy network of belief.

  The summer Alan turned twelve they had driven to the farm in western New South Wales, the four of them in the station wagon, two days on the road. The visit was a disaster. It didn’t matter what he’d done, sold a quarter of a million copies of his books, hailed internationally as one of the ‘top ten under forty’ for fuck’s sake, built a house on the proceeds, he still wasn’t good enough for his father, would never be, the only thing he could have done to get his blessing was to come back and take over the farm, that vast expanse of emptiness and sheep.

  He’d never had any time for sheep. The single thing about the place for which he held any nostalgia were the shearing sheds. And, of course, the dogs. The old man never let him have one. They’re working animals, he said, not toys. No discussion or empathy, just an aphorism delivered at best reluctantly, without explanation. One of those famous pronouncements which loomed out of the dark ocean of his father’s mind like an iceberg; all the reasoning hidden below the surface. The assumption being that somehow his abstruse mutterings might be able to carry the weight of everything that had gone into their making when of course they couldn’t, no simple word could possibly carry that weight; a great poet might, in his lifetime, manage to imbue a single sentence with as much meaning as his father’s statements were intended to convey. To Guy as a child they’d been tyrannical rebukes of everything he was. Even as an adult, become a different person, his own man, he couldn’t protect himself from them.

  After several days they’d been unable to restrain their enmity any longer. An argument broke out at the dinner table from which neither man would resile. The women trying to sort it out between them but if anything only making it worse. As if things had not been said. He ordered the family into the car and drove off, regardless of the hour. His mother on the veranda, arms crossed, asking him not to go like this. Helen in the passenger seat, silent and critical, knowing better than to say, You’re just like your father, you’re two of a kind, both as stubborn as each other, but thinking it so loud he could feel it, the two children in the back also silent, frightened, no doubt, by the ferocity of the exchange. Sarah strapped in, complaining about Alan who was lying across the seat, his feet touching her legs. Driving into the night with furious purpose, scanning the empty road for kangaroos. After an hour or so everyone asleep. He stopped to pee at one point, standing out on the western plains with the firmament arrayed above him, the air cold, the car’s motor ticking down. Nobody woke. He had a drink of water and drove on, given confidence in his decision by the glory of that sky. He loved to drive at night, loved the passage of the road beneath the car. It brought, he believed, a peculiar kind of twentieth-century quietude, something no other human beings in history could ever have felt, special to their time.

  Around first light he must have drifted into sleep. He woke, adrenaline filled, to the sound of gravel beneath the tyres. Pulling the wheel. Too late. In the ditch at a hundred and ten. Coming up the other side. The left front of the car rising. Time enough to realise what was happening. That’s how long they were in the air. The car come free of the earth. Back down again. Onto its side, spinning, sideways, once, twice. Doors flown open. Objects taken flight. Glass breaking. Noise like he’d never heard: a great rending shriek of metal, once, twice, a third time. Coming to rest upside down in someone’s paddock. Wheat.

  They were fortunate as these things go. Someone was coming behind, witnessed the accident, stopped.

  He never saw his son dead. They found him in the paddock, unmarked, lying on the flattened stalks, his neck broken, thrown from the car during one of its revolutions.

  Helen and Guy they airlifted to Sydney. He’d been nearly scalped, had ‘serious internal injuries’, as well as broken ribs, had lost a lot of blood. Helen had a fractured leg and a broken shoulder, cuts and abrasions. Sarah was, remarkably, alm
ost unhurt.

  When he heard what had happened Guy could not see how he might continue to live. Never mind the tubes and wires attached to his body, forcing nutrients and drugs into his veins.

  Helen refused to speak to him. Her parents came down and stayed in a motel nearby with Sarah until Helen was well enough to be discharged. They took them back to the Sunshine Coast. Left him there.

  His father came to see him. He woke from one of his deep drugged sleeps – they were keeping him sedated because of his propensity for ripping out the cannula – to find the old man sitting there, his good town hat in his lap, his thick arms with the red-blond hairs on them and the sunspots, the stubbed, damaged fingers with the cracks around the joints.

  ‘What are you doing here, Dad?’ he said.

  ‘Your mother would have come but she finds the travel hard,’ he said. ‘So you got me.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I’ve come to sit with you,’ he said. ‘See you don’t do something stupid.’

  ‘What, like kill my son?’

  His father could have said, ‘You already did that.’

  If it was a play he was writing that’s what he’d have got him to say and then there would have been the great unravelling, the family secrets drawn out, torn from both of them, although what those might be in their case, he wasn’t sure, except for a great unwillingness to allow feeling into anything.

  It wasn’t a play, it was him in a hospital room and Alan dead somewhere, he didn’t even know where. Alan dead in a wheat field and his father sitting next to him, as short of words as usual, Guy wondering where in hell he got the facility for them, not for the first time when faced with the enigma of the old man, not just his arms and fingers but his whole body swollen in its skin, not fat, but as if someone had pumped him up a bit so that the skin was tightened at the folds and joints, burying those eyes of his which had already sunk back into his head to avoid the quantity of light coming off the land.

  ‘Can happen to anyone,’ was what his father said. ‘Nothing you can do about it.’

  The traffic easing north of the city. Still not flowing the way he wanted it to. Fools to the front of him, scoundrels behind. The old car’s air-con struggling with the heat. When he had a Senator’s salary he’d arrange to lease a better one. Perhaps even something German. When Helen was gone and he didn’t need to listen to her disparagement of prestige cars. No justification for it, she would say, it’s just men and their egos. No appreciation of what could be achieved through fine engineering, no understanding of the flow of ideas which travelled from performance cars down to the sort of thing he was accustomed to drive.

  On the half hour he got the state-wide news. A line item announced that a woman allegedly attacked in the Sunshine Coast hinterland was now in a critical condition in hospital in Brisbane. Three men had been arrested in connection with the incident. A fourth was wanted to assist police in their enquiries. The briefest interview with local police. The arrested men, as well as being charged with assault, were being held on two counts of possession of a dangerous substance with intent to interfere with a water supply. Terrorism had been ruled out. Investigations were continuing.

  He called a contact at the local paper. The man had the decency to ring him straight back, something that couldn’t be said about certain others.

  ‘Charles,’ Guy said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I thought you might know more than me, Guy.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘Well whoever these people were they were on your side, Guy. Seems they wanted to wipe out some endangered frog at the dam site. They had a truckload of poison they were about to pour in the creek.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake. Who told you this?’

  ‘It’s in the police reports. It’s already up on our website.’

  ‘But there aren’t any endangered frogs in the creek. The Environmental Impact Statement was lodged weeks ago. I’ve read it.’

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’

  ‘No. You can’t. This isn’t an interview. I’m out of town and I’m ringing to ask you for information. Not the other way around.’

  ‘So this is off the record?’

  The ramifications of his position seeping in around the edge of his consciousness. Nothing decent about the prompt return of his call.

  ‘Yes, very definitely. Listen, I’ve got a call coming in on another line. I’ll have to go.’

  Coming up the hill he ran into rain. Nothing unusual for Winderran. When Helen was gone he’d consider moving somewhere else. At least take a flat in Canberra. Or perhaps Melbourne. The cultural life beckoning. It wouldn’t be Rome, of course, but nor was it fucking Brisbane.

  He parked on the street in front of the hospital. Ran to get under the portico. Pushed into the odd little foyer with its wooden memorial boards to the town’s fallen. Rolls of honour. Washing his hands, then on into the wards. The woman in the nurses’ station was on the phone, she looked up and, seeing him, pointed down the hall, mouthing the number Ten.

  Helen in a room by herself. The life gone out of her. On her back with her eyes closed; her mouth, pale-lipped, sagging to one side. A drip feeding a cannula in her right forearm. One of those little things clipped to the end of her finger to record the vitals. A button next to her left hand which she might press for pain relief if she was conscious enough to do so. Unrecognisable as his wife and yet unmistakeable. Barely any flesh on her at all.

  He sat in the single plastic chair provided. Hard to get it close because of the height of the bed and the electronic gear she was hooked up to. A device on a wheeled stand measuring her blood pressure; a clear plastic box on another one containing a thing like a caulking gun delivering titrated doses to the drip. LED numbers pulsing. He’d been rushing to get there, as if it was a goal in itself. Now there was nothing to do. All this shit still tumbling around in his head. The dam, Aldous, the dinner the previous night, the young man and what had gone down there. No pun intended. He took Helen’s hand in his. Her fingers pale and cold, damp. The skin translucent. Her breath coming in this weird broken rhythm, long spaces between the out and the in so that he thought, for a moment, it might happen right then. That she’d been waiting for him to arrive in order to go.

  It was a fantasy. She was still in the grip of life.

  When, eventually, they’d sent him back to Queensland he and Helen had barely been able to communicate. They lived as satellites of each other in the house that had lost Alan, caring for Sarah as best they could. A mutual agreement to put her first.

  Weeks passed.

  One morning Helen came to his office, which by then he’d virtually made his home. Not yet recovered but able to look after his own needs. She stood at the end of his bed, her hands on the wooden baseboard, a thin woman with short hair and a face he wasn’t sure he could connect with the woman he’d begged to take him back on the beach thirteen years before.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said.

  ‘It’s about your work.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘If you write about this I’ll never speak to you again,’ she said. ‘You can write about anything in the world, but this is not for you to use.’

  Writing, at the time, he’d have had to say, if she’d wanted to listen, if she hadn’t walked out of the room before he could reply, was the furthest thing from his mind.

  Time passed. He went out into the corridor and found the toilet. When he came back she was more awake, her eyes open. She looked, he thought, terrified. He took her hand again but she pulled it away with surprising force. The pain acting on her.

  He went to find a nurse who came back with him and checked the chart, adjusted the drip. Helen lay with her head towards him, watching. She opened her mouth and he thought she was going to speak but nothing came out, at least no words, just a little dribble of something like vomit which caused her to cough, forcing her to roll onto her
side, an agonising process, trying to spit. He got a tissue and wiped away the mess, but clumsily, having to wipe two or three times, unpractised at the task, holding her shoulder as he did so, astonished at how small she’d become. He tried to offer water.

  She didn’t want it. He thought she was trying to say something. He leant close to her, his ear next to her mouth. Fetid breath. Something rotten within. Dying from the inside out. She said a few words but they were indistinct. He thought they might have been, Make it stop.

  ‘She’s still in pain,’ he said to the nurse.

  ‘She can administer pain relief through the drip whenever she wants.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s working,’ Lamprey said. ‘Can you give her something stronger?’

  The nurse consulted the chart again. ‘She’s had as much as her body can take at this time,’ she said.

  ‘Is there something else you can give her?’

  ‘I’ll talk to Doctor,’ the nurse said.

  He wasn’t cut out for this. It wasn’t just that he hated hospitals, their smells, their architecture – why was it they had to be painted one colour halfway up the wall and another for the rest, like boarding schools – hospitals demanded something from him he didn’t know how to give.

  Make it stop.

  ‘Who is the doctor? Is Doctor Lasker back yet?’

  ‘Doctor Cunningham’s presiding at the moment. But I can find out if Doctor Lasker is available. If you’d like.’

  ‘Please.’

  His phone rang. Bain. Somehow, for a few minutes, he’d managed to forget about this business. It was all he could do to answer. Trying the sliding door to the garden and surprised to find that it opened, going outside onto a little paved area with a moulded plastic chair and table, some heliconias between it and the next room, a view out across a fence onto paddocks where brown and white dairy cows fed on rich grass.

  ‘Aldous,’ he said.

  ‘Guy. What have you found out?’

  ‘Very little. I spoke to a contact at the local paper.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! What on earth made you do that?’