SHE WANTED TO VERIFY that it was a three-minute town so she crossed the railway line again to examine things as laid out so cleverly and essentially.
Some things she was looking at for a second time, but now she had a room in town, the angle of inquiry was different. She found what she wanted. She found for example that the little Congregational church carried a fading pastel poster on its noticeboard: Myambagh is not Your Ambagh. It’s God’s Ambagh! She wanted to see, and found, the town baths with a drained pool, a high wire fence and a locked gate with the sign THE FLORENCE TRELOAR MEMORIAL POOL.
She wanted to see the other two-story pubs, the Royal and Tattersall’s, whose polarity on the south side of the line kept Murchison’s Railway Hotel in its place on the north. She wanted to see the standard war memorial, the putteed World War I digger, forearms folded on the butt of his bayonet-down rifle. She wanted to read the never before encountered and yet familiar names of those who had gone from Myambagh into a distant furnace: Ainsworth, Brady, Clarke, Dankworth, Egan, Flannery, Gordon, Gogarty, Harris, Ireton, Jenkins, Kelly, Lloyd, Mangan … Not expecting a second conflagration, the civic fathers of Myambagh had not left room for the new generation of dead in ’39–’45. Their names were crowded onto one remaining side: Lavery, McIntosh, MacMillan, O’Leary, Phillips.
The numbing, familiar names whose sacrifice served now, each one, as a little specific of two or three syllables to take the edge off Kate Gaffney’s dementia.
Near the War Memorial, a little metal sculpture of a merino sheep in honor of Horace Wrangle, native of Devon, Myambagh’s founding pastoralist.
On a corner the Bowling Club, such lovingly cared-for greens, such friendly knots of the middle-aged and the elderly in white flannels and skirts and cardigans. At the end of the greens, which had the even plushness of an untouched snooker table, a licensed clubhouse. Kate could see the barman from the street—he wore a little black bow tie on a muscular throat. Above him, the photograph of the Monarch, and the gold-leafed Roll of Honour which said who had won the mixed doubles in 1984.
One more corner along, the Returned Services League: Age shall not weary them. At its front desk, she could see, an elderly man was dozing. She could hear the metallic stammer of a poker machine within. The pokies, the bandits. The dispensers of small fortunes and manageable griefs, the devourers of addicted wives’ housekeeping. Age shall not weary them … Only in Kate’s nation, only in Australia and in every town, this nexus between one-armed-bandits and the holy memory of boys dead on the Kokoda Trail in 1942, in Flanders in 1917.
The high school: named after the lesser nineteenth-century explorer, discoverer of Myambagh’s fatal headwaters, which seem to flood the town on a cyclical basis, and the sighter of rare species of kingfishers. The Captain John Eglington High School. A knee-high thumb of granite stood by the fence. The Staff of the Captain John Eglington High School raised this monument in appreciation of the efforts of the students in restoring the buildings after the flood of 1986.
Beneath that the prosaic motto: Industry and Merit.
Anything more remarkable would have been a stab in the bowels, a hiatus of the breath.
Around the corner, the St. John Ambulance station had its door open, and a young, moon-eyed ambulance man sat in the vehicle, chattering into a radio without conviction. It looked to Kate as if the device was new to him, as if electronics of this sophistication weren’t his métier.
But she was not looking for clever countrymen.
All the doors of the shed marked Wrangle Shire Volunteer Bush Fire Brigade were properly shut. The memories of the incandescent bushfires of the past were held in place with a heavy lock.
She found herself turning in idly to the newsagents. She asked the woman who ran the cash register whether they stocked paperbacks.
—No, dear. We found there wasn’t the demand.
So ever more ideal, Myambagh, Wrangle Shire’s Venice, sang in her brain. Here there was a chance of being breathed in by the great antipodean stupefaction. She bought a copy of the Wrangle Shire Times, a photograph of three Rotary past presidents and their wives on its front page, and she walked out with its triviality wrapped under her arm, a sedative within reach. Who knew but that, before she got back to Murchison’s Railway Hotel, she might need to sustain herself by reading the scores of the Myambagh Central versus Wombilil A Grade cricket final?
There was an aged man, perhaps senile, on a bench outside Dunnegan’s Country Stores, who seemed to recognize her at once as a stranger.
—Have you seen our levees, dear?
—Levees?
—Flood levees, love. We’re famous for floods. The levees’re the most interesting thing in town. You ought to see the levees.
—I will. I’ll make sure of it.
—That’s the girl!
The bar when she returned was full of men in white overalls, or else with freshly scrubbed faces and combed hair, who may have recently emerged from overalls. They were the tradesmen brought in to repair the marks of the flood.
She closed herself in her room and sat on the bed.
There was a knocking on the door. Drum roll: Shave-and-a-haircut-two-bob knocking that wanted to show it didn’t have intent. Jack Murchison was there.
—Connie wants to know would you like a cup of tea?
He made two separate significant clenchings of his brows.
She recognized this as a command of unseen Connie’s. She followed the biddable Jack Murchison down the stairway and out along a verandah where the working rooms of the pub—the kitchen, the laundry, the meat-cutting room—were all located, their walls hedged in by the metal kegs waiting for collection. Kate entered the oven-warm kitchen in which Connie Murchison sat, feeding stewed pears to one of her two children who were just home from school. Jack Murchison’s wife was dark-eyed and with a dark and yet at the same time pale complexion. She was severely handsome. She had bruised, aggrieved eyes, a genetic grievance her parents had passed on to her. A bitterness due to the ancient behavior of the Turks or the Macedonians.
One child, a boy, large-boned like Jack, roamed the kitchen looking for something to put on bread. A mountainous woman was cooking steaks at an enormous fuel stove. Veal and langouste and angel-hair pasta had no place in the Railway Hotel dispensation. Here you gorged on steak and eggs and white bread. You perished early of a heart clogged by hefty protein.
The steak’s redolence was an omen for Kate and a navigational reminder. It told her she was on course to a tolerable end. Connie put her youngest child down and let it run out the door.
—You want a cup of tea?
—Yes.
She couldn’t prevent that silly involuntary flick of the head.
—Anything the matter? asked Connie with a new kind of suspicion. The tic soothed Connie’s moral concern but raised the possibility her new guest was epileptic.
Kate was aware that as she drank the tea, Connie watched her and held the discontented mouth in repose.
—We’ll have lots of men in for tea. Every night we’ve got lots of men. Jack says he really doesn’t think you know how many.
—I didn’t really know. I was looking for a quiet town. But I’ll see how this goes.
—Well, it’s a quiet town. Except the place is full of men. This is the way Myambagh goes: we have a flood every three years, and every time it happens, the politicians come in by helicopter and promise immediate help. So they fly in tradesmen, and pay them these special rates to paint and plaster before the damn place has even dried out. And then, a year or two later, when the town has dried out, they send them all back again, because by then the plaster has fallen off the walls, and the paint’s blistered. That’s why Shirley’s cooking all those steaks you see. For the men. You know.
Throughout her introduction Connie looked at Kate with cagey eyes. Again and quite frankly, the eyes of a woman who may not have seen the worst but certainly expected to.
—So you’re not really keen on the town being full of men?
Kate shook her head. In fact she was wondering whether she would leave, go west on the unused portion of her Bourke ticket. But it would mean giving up this exactly tailored town.
—I’m not a men sort of person.
Her eyes following her smaller boy child around the kitchen, Connie gave a snort of laughter. It sounded sisterly.
—God, that’s going to disappoint them.
Shirley the steak cooker laughed too.
Connie said, They really need women, those buggers. For about ten minutes a week.
Kate was emboldened now.
—I suppose I was brought in here to pass a test?
—Yeah, said Connie. Grievance came back to her face again, the sullenness which derived from before her birth. But as if to show that she had grounds for complaint in the present imperfection of things as well, she yelled, Hey, Jack! You called the distributor in Dubbo yet?
From the public bar Jack yelled, Soon darls! I’ve just got to broach a new keg first.