Grassdogs
Page 17
He gains a great deal of satisfaction from filling his trolley, then realising he does not have room for it all in his backpack, has to put half of it back. This oversight embarrasses him and he promises himself that next time he will not make the same error. He stands in line. He waits his turn. He selects a bill from his wallet and, when the girl still holds out her hand, selects another. Ping and ding go the till. She pours the change into his hand. She does not talk to him, so he does not talk to her. The transaction is complete. He has done it.
When he is organised he follows the main road west out of town. No one recognises him. He averts his eyes as he passes the hospital. The knee-high fences. The sprinklers. The golf course still brown and barren. When the suburbs finally disappear behind him he jumps the fence and begins to walk cross-country to the south. This, at long last, is what he has been waiting for. The smell of the grass, the sound of his feet swishing through it, the feel of it against his legs, all make his skin tingle into goose flesh. It is a sensation, in his skin and in his mind, that he does not have words to explain. It seems to stretch before him forever. He imagines a dog at his side coming to life in the grass.
His legs feel good. His muscles stretching pleasantly, the backpack hanging heavy on his shoulders. He is still fit. He feels as though he could march on like this forever. Once he sits down under his new hat in the long grass. He eats half a packet of biscuits and four apples. Then he marches on. Lynne is right. The old house has been sold. When he comes to the rise that overlooks the shallow dish scooped in the earth he sees that it has completely disappeared. The shed is gone. Even the old peppercorn tree. The fences dividing his land from Dungay’s have also vanished. The weeds too have vanished. As far as he can see, there stretches a lush green sea of wheat. The horizon ripples. He cannot tell exactly where the house has stood. Even the old driveway is covered. He walks a few circles in the wheat, like a dog smelling its own lost scent. He walks through the wheat, and continues to walk. On the far rise of the earth dish he sees again the familiar lion-shaped silhouette of the Rock. Kengol. It is as familiar to him as a dream. He heads for that; his eyes on it like a wall. The only trace of his history left. Without such history, suddenly, he does not feel bereft at all, no no no, he feels free. Free and confident in the new world.
He learns the hard way that Dungay has now installed electric fences around his empire. It is another sensation he finds difficult to describe. The paddocks under his feet are like carpet. Perfectly ploughed. The heads of wheat whispering in the breeze. Grass seeds cling to his clothes. There is not a cloud in the sky. It is late afternoon when the grass thins and gives way to the bush, which thickens amongst boulders, telling him he has reached the Rock. In the little township, along the power lines, not a starling has moved, not a leaf has fallen since he last stood on this spot outside the butcher’s. The same displays in the dusty windows. He skirts back out of the town and, crossing the shale slopes, begins the slow ascent. It isn’t a mountain, it can’t be called climbing. He sees the place amongst the she-oaks where the fox mauled him, and examines the boy he was once, crouching there in that spot. The boy turns, or Edgar’s memory of the boy turns, their eyes meet. Then the boy that is Edgar raises his arm and seems to point further up the track. Wind sifts the trees. Does that boy exist outside his mind? The fox? Do any of his dogs? He rolls up his sleeve and looks at his arm. There is still a pale, faded scar. A scratch, amongst the newer ones. He walks on.
An hour later he makes it to the top, panting, not as fit as he thought. The view is still the same. Rectangles of bare earth alongside rectangles of sprouting green. Young wheat or yellow squares of canola. Or great coils of hay rolled up like snails. Parallelograms of stubble yet to be ploughed under the common denominator of the earth. It is like a great patchwork blanket he cannot see to the edges of. Around him on the hillside a recent fire has blackened many of the trees descending along the lion’s flank. The black scars against the blue sky. Where will the crows hide now? Why, anywhere.
He finds he remembers the shapes of some of the rocks.
On the highway below he sees the ants of cars moving along. He climbs along the ridge, which also has the familiarity of a dream. There is no path, it is all overgrown—but Edgar knows the route where it dips down along the western side away from the road. Way below, to the right, he sees sheep the size of aphids. Fletcher could have come this way or climbed the ridge from the southern end, his own backpack weighing on his shoulders. He sees the shiny round coins that are dams reflecting the copper sun. Plenty of water, if he cares to climb down to it. Crows circling, their calls miaowing on the breeze.
He reaches the first of the hidden caves. There is no one waiting for him. Of course not. Although he knows the ridge intimately, he cannot say he remembers this particular cave, of the six or seven burrowing into the ridge. Why hadn’t the boy he once was found this interesting? In gaol they sometimes called him a caveman. He knows how to live in a cave. He has survived. He puts down his things and builds a fire at the mouth and rolls his sleeping bag out on the ground. It is only marginally harder than the prison bunks he has grown so used to. The cave is about five times the size of a cell. He cooks meat over the coals of his fire and eats with his knife and fork on a tin plate. To the west the lights of only two homesteads glimmer in the distance. If he’d bought candles he would have been able to work at night. Should have thought of that. He has a ton of food in his backpack. He is a caveman with a credit card. Money in his pocket. If he runs out he might go and ask Dungay for a job. Wouldn’t that old bastard get a shock at this bewhiskered ghost from the past. And if not him, then the next farmer, or the next. He doesn’t even need the money. When he grows thirsty he will suck stones. What he needs, he decides, is a dorg.
Towards dawn a bushrat or some creature scampers over him. He wakes with a start. The fire is out, but still warm beneath the ash. Ducks are landing on the dams way below. He takes the camp shovel and begins to dig. Towards the back of the cave the dirt floor is shallow and he soon strikes rock. The mouth of the cave is deeper. He digs all day, piling the dirt up to one side—stopping to eat, then digging again—moving the pile from one side to the other so he can get beneath it. He places the smaller rocks aside and thinks they will do well for a wall to keep out the wind. He finds he has increased the headroom of the cave considerably. The smell of freshly turned earth fills his senses.
I still picture him up there—he is doing what he can for Sophie. Sophie had been kind to him. Or was it Ivy? One of them had been kind to him. He scrawls the first letter of her name in the dust, like the swoop of a bird in flight. At dusk he cooks his meal and sleeps and wakes at dawn to continue. He knows he has a problem with the rats, but that is something to set his mind to.
He is soon sweating again and, in time, has turned over most of the soil and shale in the cave, resting only when he uncovers a single, splintered bone. It is thin, like a penny whistle. There is nothing else. No small skull. He cannot even tell what sort of a bone it is. It might simply be a kangaroo’s. Perhaps they are scattered, piece by piece, in the other caves? Perhaps they have been carried away by foxes? Well, he has plenty of time. He will excavate them all. He will dig for Sophie until he finds her. He is remembering his girl. He sits on his haunches by the dead coals at the cave mouth, his hands black with soot and earth and ash. The sweat on his face dusted and grey. He raises the smooth bone to his face and smells it, running it gently across his cheek, as the unseen sun behind the ridge slowly lights the great wide paddocks stretching away from him to the west. He watches as the sun picks out details he cannot have seen even a moment before, illuminating the expanse of land and all it contains and all his eye can apprehend.
Celebrating New Writing
THE VARUNA AWARDS FOR MANUSCRIPT DEVELOPMENT
These unique awards are for new or emerging writers of prose fiction or narrative non-fiction.
Each year the Varuna Awards offer five writers the opportunity to develo
p their work with a HarperCollins senior editor at Varuna—the Writer’s House in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. The awards aim to give practical assistance to new writers to bring their work to publication.
Applications close at the end of October each year, and the residential intensive takes place the following April.
For more information visit:
www.varuna.com.au/awardsformanuscriptdevelopment.html
Past winners include:
Denise Young The Last Ride
Winner, NSW Premier’s Awards UTS Award for New Writing, 2005; Shortlisted, South Australian Festival Awards for Literature, 2005
Robbi Neal Sunday Best
‘One of the books of the year—I devoured it’ Australian Women’s Weekly
Penelope Sell A Secret Burial
Shortlisted for the Kiriyama Award
Rebecca Burton Leaving Jetty Road
Shortlisted, Older Readers category, Children’s Book Council Awards, 2005
Ian Townsend Affection
Shortlisted, Best First Book Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2005; Shortlisted, Victorian Premier’s Awards for Fiction, 2005
Acknowledgments
While some of the incidents in this book are loosely based on anecdote, it is essentially a work of fiction. Several people have given me helpful and generous feedback at critical stages of this manuscript’s development. I wish to thank Philip Dodd, Deb Westbury and particularly Peter Bishop for reading various versions of the story and making useful suggestions. An early draft of the book was written at Booranga Writer’s Centre in Wagga Wagga where it was important for me to get the colour of the grass right. Thanks to David Gilbey for making me feel comfortable there.
In particular I would like to thank Linda Funnell of HarperCollins for her astute vision and critical eye in bringing Edgar’s world to fruition. Her structural suggestions were pivotal in pulling the story into focus. The crucial phase of the manuscript’s evolution took place at Varuna Writers’ House. The ten days I spent there under the Varuna Award for Manuscript Development program were critical. I would also like to thank Judith Lukin-Amundsen whose precise eye for detail and editorial suggestions were invaluable. Finally I would like to thank my family for their support and love, which I return with deep thanks—Barb, Olivia, and Eamon.
About the Author
Mark O’Flynn was born in Melbourne and currently lives in the Blue Mountains. He began writing for the theatre and has had numerous plays professionally produced. He has also published a novella, a play, and two collections of poetry. His fiction and poetry have been published in a wide variety of journals and magazines in Australia and overseas. In 2001 he was a founding member of Weatherboard Theatre Company, and received funding from the NSW Ministry for the Arts to write Eleanor & Eve. This play was also staged by Railway Street Theatre in 2003.
Grassdogs was one of the winners of the Varuna Awards for Manuscript Development. Mark O’Flynn is married with two children.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia
First published in Australia in 2006
This edition published 2010
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Ltd
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Mark O’Flynn 2006
The right of Mark O’Flynn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
O’Flynn, Mark.
Grassdogs.
ISBN 978 0 7322 8334 6. (pbk.)
ISBN 0 732 2 8334 5. (pbk.)
ISBN 978 0 7304 0139 1 (epub)
I. Title.
A823.3
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