This Red Earth Page 15

  Roycox tries to pull in his fat gut. ‘What did you say?’

  I say: ‘You heard.’ And I walk off, back out into the rain. The streets are empty. The streets are rivers. I hardly notice Mr Komazaki’s fake Toyota Chrysler pull up after me. I’m laughing alone, here in the street, in the rain. Past troppo. I might have gone a bit native myself now.

  Back at the bar of the New Guinea, I even order a rum. In fact, I think I’ll probably order three. I have every intention of getting very quickly crappered, when Sid Triscombe comes up to me, already with the stink of half a bottle in him. ‘That’ll put hairs on your chest, young fella,’ he says, commending my glass. Then he has to add to my face: ‘Might even cure that shyness of yours.’

  ‘Shyness?’ I say to him: ‘I’m not shy.’ I know what shyness he means, militia-shy, gun-shy, pansified, and it’s only my slim hold on what’s left of respect for my elders stopping me from telling him to get stuffed too.

  But he has to lean into me and say: ‘That so? You look pretty shy to me.’

  I should back up and leave this alone. He is pissed and goading me, probably mad with the rain himself. He’s also a veteran: he’s spent five weeks at a time in a trench getting shot at, before I was born. I’ve spent five weeks in a trench getting tinea. I should go straight back up to my room and lock myself inside my trunk with Bernie’s letters; the one about election day, with Father Gerard getting everyone to vote for a Baptist Jew, is so funny you’d pay to read it. Funny as her last letter was sad, about the beach feeling lonely even with the summer sun coming on, the surf club having trouble filling their patrol roster because all the blockheads have joined up. So I don’t back up. I lose all hold on respect.

  ‘What?’ I say to Sid. ‘You reckon I’m shy because I won’t come and play soldiers with you in my five minutes off?’

  Unfortunately, at this precise moment, Johno’s mate Sven Jorgensen walks in for a bottle to take out with him, saying, ‘Hello, Gordon.’ He’s got his .22 slung across his back, on his way pig-shooting. I ask him: ‘Can I have a quick loan of your rifle, please? I won’t be two minutes.’

  ‘Okay, sure.’ Sven looks a bit confused but he hands it over.

  I don’t move from where I’m standing at the bar. I aim the muzzle out the open glass doors and say to Sid beside me: ‘See those coconuts up there, the nearest palm?’ And I fire. Two of them fall onto the tennis lawn with a splash and a scream from the ladies lounge, as I say: ‘That’s how shy I am.’

  ‘Struth.’ Sid’s ducked down on his haunches and Mr Chittaway is running out of his manager’s office shouting: ‘Good God, man!’ knocking over a bucket of ping-pong balls on the way. ‘You can’t do that in here!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell Mr Chittaway. I mean it, too, and not only because my bad knuckle has just exploded up my arm with the shot. Sid Triscombe looks to have seen a ghost as he stands up again, staring at me, appalled. One of the native boys is hiding under a table: afraid of me. No one speaks, no one moves. Still and quiet as Mother Mountain out there, except for the chaos of ping-pong balls bouncing across polished boards in here. I hand the rifle back to Sven, and I am ashamed of myself. Afraid of myself. I tell Sid, especially: ‘I’m sorry. I–’

  I don’t know what’s got into me, except that I do. I was supposed to be getting married today.

  I’m about to take off back to the Weekender to plan my disappearance via the next plane back to Sydney, before I’m chucked out, when Sid claps me on the shoulder and turns me around. The cracks in his rum-soaked face could swallow a dog, swallow me, as he says: ‘It’s all right, son. I understand.’

  BERNIE

  Please don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while.

  That’s all Dad said to stop Mum’s world from turning, their code for him going off to … the unimaginable. That Mum has been expecting it for all this time, through every letterless day, doesn’t make it any easier for her to take. She’s shrunk a couple of inches overnight with the burden. Of not knowing where he is or what he’s doing, but knowing too well now that he is in danger. Shrunk another inch again since we left home for Central, for me to catch the train to Hay.

  ‘Mum, I don’t think I should go,’ I tell her, again.

  And again she insists: ‘Of course you should go – go and put something right.’

  Bring Emilia back for her. See if I don’t. And Dad would agree. But Mum looks so … what?

  ‘I’m sorry, love, I’m not myself,’ she says, clicks her tongue and winces: ‘Pay no attention to me.’

  ‘Mum, you’ve nothing to be sorry for.’ I hug her, but not for too long. She stiffens in my arms, not wanting a display.

  ‘All aboard!’ the train guard bellows up the platform, porters and passengers rushing every which way. ‘Riverina Express! All aboard!’

  Mum just about pushes me up into the carriage. ‘Don’t forget to wear your hat out there, Missy.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I say, just. Mum is looking at me as if her own life depends upon my wearing a hat for the duration. I’ll wear my blooping hat too, won’t take it off for the whole four days I’ll be gone. Give her a quick kiss and don’t look at her again until I’m safely in my seat.

  From where I can see she’s even smaller than I thought, more stray greys through her hair than I’ve noticed before. Waving me away with her hankie and her pasted-on smile. Peggy Doyle, who once went all the way to Melbourne to meet her Bill off the ship, old now and she’s only forty-four and not quite a half. The whistle blows as the train choofs out into the sunlight. I watch her until Sydney disappears into the mountains, into the gums. This war. Interminable, and yet it’s only just begun.

  Four hundred and fifty miles and fifteen hours away, I watch the sun coming up over a land that’s all sky, and don’t wonder why the Department of Army doesn’t care so much about security out here. It might be difficult to escape, much less inspire a revolution, from the end of the line, after Grong Grong, Narrandera, Willbriggie and The Middle of Nowhere. Exactly the middle, too – we’re halfway to Adelaide. I know Australia is wide, but I’ve never understood just how wide, and we’re not even out of the State, nowhere near the border.

  There’s a tap at the compartment door. ‘Would you like any last refreshments, miss? We’re about fifteen minutes from Hay.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I sing out to the tea girl; I need the whole fifteen minutes to unmess myself.

  Between squinting out the window, looking for the trees I’d expected there’d be in the Riverina, with its Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme producing millions of tons of peaches and pears for the Ardmona Fruit Company, write that in your geography book ten times, Sister Columba. But I can’t see any trees at all. Only patches of scrub, over an endless plain, flat as a penny. How far are you going today, dear? my elderly lounge-car companion asked yesterday, and when I said all the way, she nodded approvingly. Home, dear? she peered at me, trying to place me in the scheme. That was a Mrs Overton, who got off at Junee last night, on her way home from visiting with her brother in Mittagong, and who, it turned out as she chatted for a State medal, is a cousin-in-law of Mrs Finlay’s from Orange, who went to school with her good friend, Mrs McBride, from Gundagai, and through her husband knows Dad’s Aunty Ena’s second cousin Iris in Dunedoo, the CWA being as wide as the country itself.

  Wide and gold, I think as the sun rises a little higher, picking out the tops of the scrubby shrubs, lighting up the fields: gold. A lumpy field of gold is what it looks like, before I see the lumps are sheep. A great big pen of them, by the side of the tracks as we slow for the station.

  The engine hisses to a stop and I step down onto the platform to a chorus of baaaaaas. A couple of stockmen types on horseback smoke cigarettes as a dog runs across the top of the small sea of sheep behind them, and everything is golden – the spare spiky grass, the fence posts, the fleece, the edges of the men’s wide-brim Akubras. I’ve woken up inside the pages of Dreams in the Dust. Fair dinkum sunburnt outback cliché.
But with what appears to be another big pen strung with barbed wire a quarter of a mile up off to the left of the sheep, an arrangement of huts, a watchtower, that must be –

  ‘Miss Cooper?’ the deep voice of authority calls for me to stop wandering up the platform, but when I turn around I see it’s not a guard but another stockman type striding towards me. One that stops my heart for a second with the set of his gait, the white moleskin trousers, blue Scotch twill shirt-sleeves rolled, the set of his brim, turned right down over his eyes. It’s Rock, coming home to Coogee with the red dirt of Nyngan still dusting the leather of his boots. It’s not, of course. The dirt here is ordinary dirt brown, and this man doesn’t even take off his hat as he says: ‘Mitchell Lockhart.’ More instruction than introduction. I suppose he is a relation of the Mrs Lockhart that I’ll be stopping with tonight and till next train Tuesday, but he doesn’t provide that small courtesy of information. He points at my luggage on the platform behind me, my fawn suitcase and my Good Companion, and says: ‘That all you got with you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I can’t help the frown as I think what a waste of a fabulous name. Mitchell Lockhart – that’s Hollywood grade. But I don’t reflect on this further: every fly in town has just made a beeline for me and I’m waving at my face like a madwoman fighting her hatbox as he grabs my luggage and strides off, turning into the station building. I’d say, Well, good day to you too, if I dared open my mouth. He’s holding the door open for me, and issuing another instruction, impatient: ‘Wait here, will you.’ Virtually hurls my cases across the floor with complete disregard for DJ’s best cowhide and British Best typewriter, and he’s about to stride back outside again as I pull him up: ‘Excuse me, I am waiting for …?’

  ‘For me to see those ewes are being got onto the trucks,’ he tosses the words behind him. ‘Then I’ll take you round to the house.’

  ‘House?’

  ‘Mum’s.’

  ‘Right.’ The door swings shut in my face. Mitchell Lockhart, son of Mrs, I must presume. Poor Mrs Lockhart. She sounded so pleasant on the phone, not that we spoke for more than two minutes. Mrs Carlton from the Dee Why Harbourside Branch put us in touch yesterday morning. Aren’t you our Gordon’s fiancée? said this Mrs Lockhart, chirping through my fog of worry over Dad. Well, of course, stay as long as you like, dear. Incredible: our Gordon. Nyngan is three hundred miles north of here: I know, I checked on the atlas with a ruler. But you’d think they were all down-the-road neighbours. Mrs Lockhart also sounded about as happy as Mrs Finlay at there being foreigners corralled on her showgrounds – Hmm, nasty business. I hope she’s not nasty about Italians. There’s nowhere else for me to go if she is. Mrs Overton from the train knew of her, Mrs Lockhart being the President of Hay Branch, and what did she say about her? Redoubtable spirit, that Bess Lockhart. What does redoubtable mean? Brave? Or terrifying.

  Means I won’t know till I meet her for myself. Look out at the ewes while I’m waiting, and feel no better as I watch them being herded towards the trucks, big wooden crates sitting on a siding track, being crammed into them, off to a fate I’d prefer not to contemplate. Just how many lamb dinners have I consumed in my little life? Good grief but it’s heating up quickly in here. Start throwing everything out of my handbag looking for something to make a fan out of, when the door bangs open again with, ‘Head off now then’, and I just about hit the roof with fright.

  ‘What?’ And I startle again when I don’t recognise the man in front of me now, before I realise he’s taken his hat off. And then blush – deep fuchsia. Mitchell Lockhart is handsome as a lion: hay-coloured hair, hazel eyes and a tea-stain tan making him gold all over. He is a lion. He’s also at least five years my senior, with a hard-set jaw that says he allocates approximately five minutes less ten each day for suffering fools.

  But he smiles now, as I fluster about stuffing my embarrassment back into my handbag. A crooked smile, saying: ‘I said we’ll head off now then.’ At least I think it’s a smile. ‘Long trip, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, as he swipes up my cases, and I attempt to recover myself by nattering: ‘Sheep all off to market then?’

  ‘No.’ He puts his hat back on, somehow disappearing under it, and letting the pause stretch with his stride across the room, stretching till I think no is all the answer I’ll get to my silly question, before he says: ‘Those ewes are off to relief country, near Yass.’

  I don’t know what that means, so I say: ‘Oh?’

  ‘The drought,’ tossing the words behind him again: ‘Not enough feed for them here.’

  ‘They’re your ewes?’ I ask, like a dill. Farmers have been sending their sheep away to greener pastures as the drought drags on across the State. He’s not a stockman, is he; he’s a grazier. Might explain why he’s a bit grim.

  ‘That’s right,’ says this Mitchell Lockhart, stepping out into the sun that’s now promising a hundred and ten degrees of Hades’s best. We’ve come out of the building on what appears to be the town side of the tracks, where there’s a shop, one shop, with a rusting tin awning over a faded ad for Bushells tea and dun-coloured paint peeling against a sky so blue it can only be called screaming, and as I pull my own brim firmly down on my head I’m about to say, Goodness, it’s warm, when I see a couple of tall, graceful vanilla-trunked gums either side of the gravel drive in front of the station and remark instead: ‘Oh, trees.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mitchell Lockhart repeats, giving me another long-distance pause, before nodding at a gleaming black utility parked just beyond one of these trees. ‘And that’s a motor vehicle.’

  I would connipt at that if I knew whether he was having fun with me or not. He opens the cab door and the interior, like the exterior, is so spit-polished I decide to err on the side that says he’s absolutely humourless. He’s certainly absolutely uninterested in his passenger as he drives us into the town along the wide brown dirt road, but it’s a town that nevertheless has plenty of both trees and motor vehicles. Small but neat and complete, even got a milk bar called the Manhattan, which does force a snort from me. American Beauty ice-cream ad in the window says they’re Greeks: got to admire that Mediterranean sense of geography.

  Mitchell Lockhart doesn’t take his eyes off the dirt road. Ropey forearms gripping the wheel, turning left and past a cluster of rickety weatherboards, and then right down what soon becomes a grassy track, green grass, shaded by rambling old figs. A long cool bumpy drive of these lovely old figs, at the end of which he pulls up in front of the loveliest, most thoroughly gorgeous old stone house I’ve ever seen. Silver bullnosed verandah dappled by another of those vanilla gums, and willows trailing down into what I suppose is the Murrumbidgee River rolling along out the back. Gasp for want of a hundred superlatives: ‘What a beautiful place.’

  ‘Not when it floods.’ Mitchell Lockhart pulls up the brake, and I’m dreading again what sort of redoubtable sourpuss Mrs is going to be, must be, when she emerges from the shadow of the bullnose, waving over a great big unmistakeable smile.

  ‘Miss Cooper, so pleased to meet you!’ Not a sourpuss but a redoubtable plum pudding barrelling towards me, string of cultured pearls and matching smudge of flour on an outstretched forearm that is possibly deadly with pin in hand. CWA poster girl. Except for the Molyneux pencil pleats she’s wearing under her apron, showing that she’s not regular catalogue stock. There’s nothing poor about this Mrs Lockhart. Squeezing my hand, cheerful as the pansies spilling over the edges of her flowerbeds: ‘My word, aren’t you pretty. Of course you are. Bernadette, isn’t it? How do you do?’ Not giving me half a second to answer before she’s pulling me across the verandah with: ‘You must be faint with hunger, dear – once upon a time the Express did a decent meal, but that’s all gone the way of war economy, hasn’t it?’ Another question I can’t answer before she adds: ‘And our Gordon is in New Guinea, isn’t he? How terrifically exciting for him.’

  Mrs Lockhart can talk for Australia. World championship chat.

  Still squeezi
ng my hand, picks it up and inspects it as she drags me down the hall. ‘No ring? Oh dear, I haven’t been given the wrong story, there, have I?’

  She finally takes a breath, and I look down at my hand, wondering for a moment what on earth she’s referring to, before I realise: ‘Ah. Oh. Um. Yes, we’re engaged, it’s just that he didn’t have the–’

  ‘Thank heavens for that,’ Mrs Lockhart pats her breast in relief as she shows me into the sitting room. ‘He’s a catch and a half, our Gordon, isn’t he?’ and I’d show her the jasper B he gave me to prove it, but she’s gone, calling behind her: ‘Make yourself at home, dear, won’t be a moment.’

  Leaving me among the chintz tea-roses and teal velveteen of this sitting room. I almost whistle as I take it all in: the Lockharts are possibly a lot less poor than first impressions. There’s a servants’ bell pull by the door and a gilt-framed portrait of a ram above the mantel, a ram of regal bearing that bleats imperiously at me: Yes, we are Squattocracy with a capital S. And look at the china laid out on the table by the bay window: yes, that’d be real Wedgwood. Possibly heirloom. Makes me wonder at the connection to our Gordon. Seems a familiar and genuinely fond one, but I don’t recall him ever mentioning any Lockharts, and there’s nothing squattocratic about him. I can hear him laughing with Dad at some of the landed gentry he went to school with, funny how you can fail arithmetic but still go on to a successful career in tax evasion, while Sister Columba defined ‘squatter’ for us in no uncertain terms as a euphemism for typical thieving, pillaging Protestantism. Oh Hughie, but there’s the most divine painting on the wall opposite the hearth, of a pioneer couple holding hands by the river’s edge: yes, that’d be a real Tom Roberts.

  ‘About time Mitchell got himself a wife.’ Mrs Lockhart barrels back in with a tray and I follow her gaze out the bay window. There’s her Mitchell, carrying a saddle across the actual idyllic river view like he’s going to take it round behind the back shed and kill it. How are these two mother and son? ‘But it is difficult for him,’ she says with an affectionate sigh. ‘He so rarely comes in from Hell.’