SHE GATHERED HER GRIP and moved to the end of the carriage before the train had even applied its brakes. The station buildings still carried the ancient yellow paint which had been on country ticket offices when she had last made a train journey as a child. She got down onto the gravel platform and made for that primeval yellow, carrying her grip. The ticket collector at the gate told her to wait until he was finished with other passengers and then fill in a form for a refund of the unexpended part of her ticket. He was mystified that she didn’t want to, that she should own a ticket good all the way to Bourke, and yet have got off here, two hundred and fifty miles short.
She was gratified that he was puzzled. She wanted a town where everything was so habitual. Where there were hardly any flighty choices made. When a man would remember, as the highlight of his working day, as something to tell his wife, that a particular unknown woman had for some reason, with a perfectly good ticket to Bourke, got off at Myambagh and had failed to apply for a refund. If this was Myambagh’s version of meeting and admitting all kinds, then it was a safe place to spend time.
Outside the station, in the railway freight yard, grass grows in clumps. There are a few strings of bulk grain wagons.
Beyond them, a broad street fringed with peppercorns. Imperial surveyors, trained in India, laid these towns out in hopeful eras, and made the thoroughfare faubourg-broad just in case.
A convent large and once, in the great days of the bush, when small farmers could subsist and when labor was widely needed, full of eager nuns from the same genetic pool as her mother, Kate O’Brien-Gaffney. The tasteful Anglican church, a sober Uniting. And the nineteenth-century courthouse in whose stone cornice are cut the lion and the unicorn and the letters VR. A few Aboriginals, and white boys in lumpy sweaters, wait on chairs on the verandah to face the last minor charges of the day.
And then she comes level to a rail crossing, with the little yellow painted cottage beside it where once a gatekeeper’s family sustained their unwritten history, and here she sees it, back across the lines, on the north side. Two stories, wide verandahs. On its fascia boards, MURCHISON’S RAILWAY HOTEL. Separated by the railway line from major institutions of the township. That was in its favor.
The train had left and had vanished further west, and as she crossed the rails by the gatekeeper’s abandoned cottage, she heard the steel sing in a silence which lasted a hundred miles eastward, back through silent towns, or ones where all that was heard were the complaints of crows and of old trucks suffering through gearshifts.
Murchison’s Railway Hotel. Deep-brown brick walls, the bricks a dainty size which had not been manufactured now for perhaps ninety years. Semicircular writing on frosted windows. Railway Hotel. Licensees’ names painted over the main bar entrance: John Patrick Murchison and Constantia V. Murchison.
She did not go into the bar, but entered through a door beyond which a stairwell rose to upstairs rooms. She thought there might have been a registration desk there. But no, this was one of those pubs where you registered in a book they kept at the bar, where if you could not survive the scrutiny of the drinkers you should not stay. A pub, that is, where beer was the main order of business, and accommodation had its place because the licensing laws were so written.
In the bar sat a few old men and some swarthy travelers who wore large stockman’s hats even indoors. At a servery window, a hefty woman was delivering steak sandwiches. The manager looked up from pouring beers and yelled, Okay, boys!
He moved to fetch the sandwiches and put them in front of the travelers. As he did it of course he noticed Kate.
At this first sighting of Jack Murchison, owner-manager of the Myambagh Railway Hotel, Kate thought he looked unreliable. He was tall but carried weight at his middle. He had an appeasing quickness to the way he delivered the sandwiches and worked the beer taps. He had been very ready to laugh when one of the travelers made some joke over the meat in the sandwich.
All this is to say that he looked the way the licensee of a pub like this should look according to the program in Kate’s head. He was properly wary as he approached Kate. Though she had dressed down, her manner wasn’t right by him. He did not know that she wanted his tolerance. She hoped that he would understand she was in earnest transition. The tragedy had to be fully absorbed into the cells yet.
—Help you, dear? he asked edgily.
—I was looking for accommodation.
She could not stop her head from shaking slightly sideways—that had been happening, a flick of the head which might look deliberate but which was beyond her will.
—We’ve got some rooms.
He cried out over a shoulder.
—Connie, watch the bar will you?
A woman’s voice, young, asked why. It sounded querulous in a habitual way.
—Someone wants to look at a room.
One of the travelers at the bar said, Jesus, Jack, you’d better get that lady up the stairs before Connie sees you.
There was a waspish titter from the old man at the end of the bar. A knowing rustle of resigned and barely requited male desire. Jack turned to the traveler in the big hat.
—Get fucked, Ian.
The publican grabbed a key from the wall beneath the rum and whiskey bottles. He signaled to Kate that she should move parallel to him along the bar and meet around the corner in the saloon. So it happened. The saloon was a little bar. It would be cozier on a winter’s night.
He then led her out into the hallway where she’d first entered and up the stairway. Paneled in cedar, its texture had been subdued by layers of varnish. The upper walls were metal molding, the sort of thing those Victorians and Edwardians who had desired to fill the world with mass-produced houses and hotels had manufactured and sent to the remotest places. Fleur-de-lis pattern, all painted cream.
The large man called Jack was half turned back to her, looking down as he climbed the stairs.
—You know we’ve got a lot of tradesmen here, working on the flood damage.
—No, I didn’t know that.
—No.
—That bugger down there’s right. Connie’ll give me hell. So no contract exists between you and me, love. I’m just showing you the room, as required by the licensing law, and that’s it. I’m not saying I’m renting it yet. I need to know a few things …
Kate felt a sort of mist of fatigue rise up her limbs.
—What things?
—Look, you don’t look like a traveling woman. Just the same, you can’t work out of a place like this. If that’s what you want. I’d lose my license.
—Work? No one’s mentioned work to you.
—You know what I mean, love. I’ve had girls stay here before and try to work the bar. The former owner ran the place like that. He took the risk. I can’t, love. Because (a) I’m mortgaged up to my armpits, (b) Connie wouldn’t let it happen, (c) There’s such a thing as the bloody licensing laws of New South Wales.
—You think I’m a prostitute? I simply want a room. Though if you wanted a reliable employee …
—Christ, an employee?
He had paused on the top step, by the gigantic, dark upstairs corridor of Murchison’s Railway Hotel.
—You know how to do that, love? Barmaiding?
—I believe I could learn pretty fast.
—You believe …
He shook his vast, meaty head in a twice-shy way.
—Not that it’s simple, I know. But I would really love to do some work like that. Repetitive. I could wash up if you wished.
—What work did you do before?
—I worked in an office.
—What’s your name?
—Kate Gaffney.
—Have you been in jail or something? Or a psychiatric hospital? Something like that?
—No. Do I look like it?
—Well, a man can always use barstaff from Thursday onwards. But Jesus, you’re a good-looking girl. Connie wouldn’t trust me round you. Look, I never go near other women. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. But Connie doesn’t believe in me, I know it. It’s her way.
—I might try one of the other places.
—Hold hard. I’d hate to see someone as pretty as you go off to the Federal or the Commercial. There are some pretty rough pubs in this town. I know you’re thinking how I don’t look like a disciplinarian. But I bloody am. I keep a good discipline. On myself, too. Pub discipline starts with the publican. Jesus, there’s some awful bastards in a town like this. Blokes from up the river who attack their little sisters. You’d be safe here, but I wouldn’t swear by the other places, not at all.
They were in the comfortless dark upstairs corridor now.
—Look, I’ve got to be square with you. I can see you being okay for business here. But Jesus, we don’t even know each other. Kate, is it? Look at the room for a start, Kate.
He opened a door. It was the very essence of room, the room she’d dreamed of on the train. Three-quarter bed, a lowboy. A blind. A bedlamp. A chair and a washbasin. One picture—a scene of the Gwydir River, cut from a calendar and framed.
—Ladies’ along the verandah. It’s not the Regent Hotel, but we keep it clean. The artwork isn’t exactly Picasso.
He tapped the glass of the picture.
—Eighteen dollars for breakfast and dinner. Hearty bush tucker, I can promise you. We can make an arrangement on a weekly rate if …
—If Connie likes me.
—Exactly, love. And not only that. You bring one man across this threshold, and you’re on your lovely little backside out in the street. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night. I’m still finding my way with the licensing police up here. You do understand me, don’t you?
Kate was tiring of Jack Murchison’s instructive tone. She undid the top button of her cardigan and dragged both the wool and the shirt beneath it away to expose her left shoulder.
—Do you see that?
Jack squinted at what Kate knew confidently to be a disfigured, deathly, lumpy parody of flesh.
—Jesus!
—Hard to make a living as a tart with shoulders like that.
—Jesus. Sorry, love.
His head was half turned away, and he was anxious for her to cover her shoulders again.
—And what about the job?
—You stick round till Poet’s Day, we’ll try you out.
—Poet’s Day?
—Yes. Friday, love. Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday. Poet’s Day.
—And you’re Mr. Murchison?
—Jack. Wife’s Connie. She’s an ethnic. Greek. Old man owns a café in Goondiwindi. Set us up in this place. Really did me a favor. Jesus!
He was not ironic about it. He was filially grateful.
From the bottom of the stairs, the Greek wife could be heard crying.
—Jack? Jack? You have to rig up another CO-two canister.
He smiled and whispered indulgently.
—She knows I’m with another woman. You watch yourself with the blokes, love. To some of them, handicaps mean nothing.
Kate had cause all at once to think of her burns as handicaps. It put them in a new light. There were kindnesses strangers did for you even with their misnomers.
—Handicaps? I can run. I can dance and even swim.
—Okay. Between now and Poet’s, you can have a good look at our metropolis, love. Should take you all of three minutes. They just closed the public baths last week for the winter. Should have left ’em till the northerlies started. Used ’em as an ice rink eh?
She found herself following him like a chatelaine to the top of the stairs. He took two steps down and then turned again.
—Connie’ll look after you, love. She’ll scare the buggers off.
The idea of Connie the virago seemed to tickle him. He laughed all the way to the bottom of the stairs.