SOMETIME LATE in this heavy night Gus, wiry and sober, carrying his tarpaulin bag, leads Chifley and stiff-kneed Menzies up the road, enticing the animals forward with pellets of stockfeed amidst houses draining of water.
No one has thought clearly about Jelly’s awful accident except Gus. And he has made proper arrangements.
He has helped the crazed woman to her room and soothed her to sleep.
He has paid Noel forty dollars to deliver the furniture truck back to his accommodating friend in Wilcannia in the near future, once the receding ferment of mind leaves Noel clearheaded enough to make the journey.
He has woken Jack and tragic-eyed Connie and told them, and Jack too has ordered Guthega and Noel what to say, and they are all compacted together in the secret.
—But why did he take Kate? Jack keeps thinking. In his perturbation, he has to resist waking her now to ask.
Jack placates Connie.
—It doesn’t have any bearing on your pub license, he has to keep telling her with something close to contempt.
Gus talks and talks and they become calm.
Then, very late, he and the beasts drive out of the old stables at the back of Murchison’s Railway Hotel without anyone noticing, though there have been people, Burnside included amongst them, walking up and down the pub’s verandahs, in the hard yellow of the light from Jack’s emergency generator, asking if anyone had heard that bloody great bang about an hour ago, and speculating on the flood.
He parks the truck by the Federal. He persuades the beasts into the boat which Noel had dragged high in the mud there. Menzies has stepped in stiff-kneed. He has lifted Chifley’s mighty tail in a way which has caused Chifley to yield up suspicion and jump into the aluminum tub.
Gus then reverses Noel’s work, pushing and dragging the boat into the water. In the shallows the bird folds the stalks of its legs and settles to the floor. Chifley stays upright, broadly balanced on his tail. A kangaroo afloat, a sight which, if there were drunks to witness it, would cause them to swear off liquor.
Far away to the left, the water police and the rescuers have lit the gap in the line and run their engines in reverse to prevent themselves being sucked through with the water into the uncontained western plains.
He was in the water to his knees, ready to board himself, when he saw a shadow of Kate in the shallows four or five paces away. She seemed to be watching him, sharp-eyed from the little he could make out of her. She seemed to be carrying an airline bag. What of the exhausted woman he’d recently put to sleep? Where was she?
—How could I stay asleep? she asked him. What do you think the first thing I dreamed of was?
She shone a torch at him as a means of emphasis. She saw him close one eye. So clearly he wanted to be alone on the road with his charges. She switched the torch off.
—No. Listen, Jack’ll think I took you off.
But she had the answer.
After packing her bag, she’d entered the Murchisons’ bedroom to leave a little note, and heard their night breath. Connie slept with skeptical little intakes of breath, but Jack’s was deep, slow, imperial. He had transcended the need for bar staff.
—He’ll do well without me. He’s got volunteers … They all want to be around him. He won’t need anyone in particular for a long time now.
—Jesus, it’ll confuse everyone. They’ll think something’s happened to you.
—Well … Did you see a man called Burnside? At the Palais last night?
—I’m not going to be responsible …
She began to weep on the edge of the flood, but there was something not supine but imperative in her tears.
—Please, she told him. Now Jelly’s gone.
He was in a sense the inheritor.
In the end Gus lacks the power to rebuff her, and so asks her to get into the dinghy with the beasts.
The leaving of Myambagh is so unexpectedly easy.
Gus could reasonably expect that the fall in the water level has left a gravelly beach exposed below the embankment, just where it meets the line going west to Bourke. A beach of gravel and shingle. Gus grounded the aluminum boat here, and Kate trod ashore with her airline bag, accompanied straight away without hesitation by Chifley the incarnate marsupial joy of her dreams, the shadow of her shadow. How she welcomed this far shore. If she had tried to utter her gratitude for not being left, she would have been defeated. There was no idiom available to her for a task like that.
In a different world, Gus might have looked comic carrying Menzies ashore, hefting the abdomen high so that the long legs would clear the gunwales of the boat and the shaly patch of beach. Such trust the bird showed: deposited on the little beach, he stood waiting.
Gus reached back into the dinghy to fetch the tarpaulin bag.
—Come on then, Kate.
Scrabbling up the embankment, she was watching the kangaroo, already briskly away and up there on the railway line above her, the line which traveled away from Jelly’s hole. The main line to Bourke. Out to Bourke, people said, to signify great distance, great dry distance, great dry interior distance. Not dry tonight though. To Bourke and back, people said to the same effect.
Gus’s rescued beasts moved as companionably as dogs in the company of Gus and Kate, sometimes going ahead along the embankment, sometimes lagging. Essential company for the night of Jelly’s obliteration. She was their dependent. She prayed nothing more would be taken before morning.
A little comradely walk, and Kate could hear but not see the surge of water below her, and feel the steel presence of the bridge’s superstructure. The vacancy between the sleepers was opaque in this light. Chifley’s paws overhung the gaps. Sometimes there was a slippage of one of his hind legs. But the great tail spanned four or five spaces, and Chifley would adjust himself like a man pulling his foot out of a bog. The lack of vertigo displayed by Chifley, high-stepping Menzies and Gus as a group imbued her with the means to make progress too.
Halfway across, Gus stepped out to the edge of the bridge-works, carrying the tarpaulin bags in his hands. He showed a steeplejack’s lack of fear.
He calls, Kate!
Kate sees and approves the aptness of his intention. Yes. Okay.
For from this woman who once was a girl in Loreto Convent there comes no glib formula, no Requiescat in pace. Jelly won’t rest in peace. Jelly will be an unquiet spirit in the river. He will hold it in a kind of equipoise, tugging it down with the weight of his spirit.
Gus lets the remnants of Jelly fall. An instant after Gus’s hand lets go, there is only a uniform abyss. Country selector, railway clerk, invalid pensioner, bar priest and dynamiter, he is plainly gone. Since the engorged river is putting out its own rhetoric, there is no noise of an entry into the water. To assert his presence, Jelly might need to wait for the level to fall and the current to slacken.
Across the bridge and a little way from the river’s racket, the line declines into a flooded cutting, and to Kate’s surprise the beasts are happy to wade or lollop their way through this. She wonders can they see or smell the hill on the far side? Jelly has barely been dropped from Gus’s hand, but this speculation is throwing a shadow of exaltation on her in the liquid black of the cutting.
Where the silver rails emerged from the water and took some of the minute light available to surfaces tonight, the Schulberger party located themselves between the parallels and climbed the slow rise.
Gus was reflecting on Jelly’s history.
—A tremendous prop forward, you know. Got a trial with a city club. But his wife wanted to stay with her mother. So Jelly was persuaded out of it. Typical of Jelly’s poor bloody life. He stayed in town for his wife’s sake, and his wife left him anyhow. And now look.
Gus’s hard life on a Soldier Settler farm near Bourke had given him perfect wind. He did not seem to pause for breath as he reached the crest and concluded Jelly’s encomium.
—When he was a country selector, he said, politicians used to queue up to shake his hand. Now his hand’s in the river.
—Yes, said Kate. A few strange shuddering tears broke out of her. They felt as if they were a long distance from her, glaciers on the moon’s face.
Making his way along the lines, Gus confessed he didn’t know what they should do. Keep on this path or cut across the paddocks to the road? Partly flooded, it was off to their right hand, but if they took it, how could they explain themselves to the police or to anyone likely to give them a lift?
Not reaching any answer for the moment, Gus began complaining about the beasts.
—These poor animals will follow me like dogs. They’ve lost their nationality. They think they’re related to me or something. Better for poor bloody Menzies if someone had blown his egg and etched a palm tree design on it. He might have been a bloody sight happier as an ornamental emu egg.
She was uneasy to find him hoping the bird back into the egg.
—Yet you rescued them from Wagga, Kate argued.
—Of course, with Chifley, it’s hard to wish him the slow death he’d’ve had in his mother’s pouch. We ran her down by accident one dusk. And we find Chifley’s still alive in the pouch. So we felt a responsibility. But this is bloody hard now, too. Look at him.
Chifley had waited behind a moment sitting on the rails and taking thought. Soon he would bound ahead, sit and contemplate again, earnestly domestic, eager as a cattle dog.
—Bugger’s so pleased to be out of Wagga. And he thinks he’s a member of the bloody union.
Kate has had a sharp though short education in floods, and she is considering their position in this light. Again, the question is slow travel by a railway track, possibly faster by road. If they could negotiate the flooded paddocks between the line and the road, she thinks, the road would be the go. On the western side of any flooded low point, there may be discovered a half-drowned car which Gus in his cleverness would know how to revive.
So the stratagem she offers to Gus is that they should watch the pastures either side of the track. If they find a flooded region, they should cross through it on the relative height of the railway track and then, when they get to the shallows on the far side, take a right-hand course directly across the fields at that very point, along the inland edge of the dip of earth where, it could be hoped, someone’s car had choked.
Not of course that a car is much use for conveying Chifley and Menzies, with their odd antediluvian design.
Gus and Kate in their gumboots and with the beasts and the still palpable presence of Jelly, traversed the shallows of someone’s lucerne field. Floodwater had spoiled it.
—Who’d be a farmer? Gus asked of the universe, though himself a farmer and cowcocky.
Kate grew weary. To her it seemed an unconscionably, a maliciously more-than-average distance from the rail to the road. She had thought the two were meant to echo each other. But this was no echo. It was a long picking of the way. Coming to one after another barbed wire fence, always part awash, parallel to the railway line but presenting no parallel highway!
At the fences Gus seemed to become overtaken by anxiety about Menzies’ thin legs. Again, as at the boat earlier in the evening, he would lift the large eccentric bird by the bowl of the abdomen and pass him across the wire to Kate. Menzies seemed extraordinarily at ease with this arrangement.
Chifley was an eccentric case. He could have cleared the fences at a bound, even on this ground. Instead he broached them lazily, humanwise, lifting up a strand of wire with a shoulder, pulling down lower ones with his great hind feet. Inserting his head through. Delightful to see, it was the negative of bounding. It was the whimsy of a great bounding beast.
—See the way he gets through fences? Gus asked Kate. See?
Gus pretended to be annoyed at Chifley’s laziness.
At last their hard progress brought them to an embankment, and on top of it a road.
The top of the road was very dry. Gus took her apologetically by the elbow. They must return a little way now, back toward the flooded town Jelly had relieved.
Soon they could see the vehicle waiting for them, a white van, almost luminous, its rear high, its snout stuck into a broad arm of flood. The van had red and blue lettering on its flanks which said that it belonged to a particular signwriter, O’Riordan of Bourke. Someone to the east of Myambagh, in Dubbo or Wagga perhaps, had lured the signwriter down here under swollen skies, promising him a contract, and when his engine choked in the water across the road, he’d sworn blue Jesus on the side of the road, and someone had given him a lift back to Girilambone or even perhaps Cobar, where he had to stay in a pub or motel, and knew that in the morning—even if things got no worse—he would need a tow truck and a mechanic.
And he would sit on his bed with his head in his hands, or buy himself a middy in the bar and complain to everyone.
—This fucking job is really going to cost me the earth now!
The water the signwriter’s truck was stuck in had a strong current, and it was hard to believe that it was not affected one way or another by Jelly’s great releasing of the Myambagh waters. Gus had to wade in tentatively, hauling Kate behind him by the hand. He wanted her to sit in the cabin and release the bonnet lever. She did it. The truck opened its maw. She could see in the side mirrors that Menzies pecked in the gravel on the edge of the water and along the broken tar of the road. But Chifley was leaping westward. That easy lope which delighted Kate in spite of everything; and then he sat back on his tail for a while and thought, and then loped east and sat again back on the thick, stupendous tail to regard Kate through the open window.
—Well, she found herself telling him. Well, where are the bloody tears?
Chifley went on staring at her indirectly, largely through reflection off the side mirror. She had found herself entertaining this fantastical idea that he had her tears held somewhere and would release them to her some time or other. Where did such a notion come from? She was engrossed by it anyhow. But Chifley did not stay long enough for it to become fixed. He loped away again to the west. All this thought seemed dependent on movement.
She got out of the cabin to discover if she could see a little of what Gus was doing. The water came up over the top of her boots and she felt the shock of its cold. She bent down and scooped up a handful and drank it. It not only smelt of, but tasted too of mud and the rankness of dead cattle and sheep and foxes. It was water of substance.
Gus talked to her about magnetos. He held spark plugs up toward an utterly shrouded moon, and blew at their apertures, cleaning them with the flame of a Bic lighter. He promised to open and clean the carburetor.
—No sense in your standing there in the water, love.
But she kept standing there, turning numb, hearing the beasts pace and shift behind her. Their habits would have brought imperfection into the Wagga man’s tableau vivant. The six medallions of the founding states of the Commonwealth of Australia could be made to stand still indefinitely, secure in their bush heraldry. But Chifley would have needed to lope aside for contemplation, and Menzies must work the earth, forwarding and backing over its surface.
And in the significant waters, flowing so coldly around her, in a scene where the only decent light was Gus’s torch, she saw without warning and with a casual but exact sharpness, down to the last nuance of their hair, their scent, the faint and particular musk of their womanhoods, the women with whom she had shared the last Sunday she ever spent aboard Kozinski Constructions’ yacht, the Vistula. She saw as well the young Mrs. Kozinski, not transmogrified yet by the raw protein of Jack Murchison’s kitchen, not even seriously threatened with change.
In thin torchlight reflected by the inside of the signwriter’s hood, she felt her shoulders itch, a different sting from the normal rankling of her scar tissue. It was a shadow not of the sun’s assault on her, but of the way it had more jovially nipped those children, bit Siobhan and Bernard lightly through the fabric of their shirts.
Before they’d left the house for the Vistula Paul had been cautious in describing the coming day. He said the guests would be a consultant and three building union officials. They were going to bring along what he wrote off as their party girlfriends. It seemed to Kate a ridiculous phrase, and she threatened to stay home. But he pleaded. He wanted to see the children.
A competent sailor, Paul took the helm, and the young deckhand the Kozinskis used for weekends worked the shrouds, and they tacked their way up lovely Pittwater, the Palm Beach houses flashing light from their picture windows across plum-blue water. On their left, the great cliffs of West Head, thickly dressed with Australia’s eccentric botany, a hanging garden from before the flood. No more beautiful place: that was established between Kate and Paul Kozinski, and was a proposition subscribed to without prejudice by all O’Briens and all Kozinskis at once.
The unionists were apparently some powerful triumvirate from what Paul called with reverence the peak council of all builders’ federations council. One small and very muscular. The other two large and strong yet flaccid. Their skins were pale with what the young Mrs. Kozinski took to be the pallor of conspiracy. They might have argued with some justice it arose from a working-class raising in Newtown or Alexandria.
In the flood by the signwriter’s truck, with water in her boots, Kate could still imagine their pallor, and the traceries of minute purple veins they showed either side of their noses.
They were jovial enough. They had a nice little patter going with Paul. He was a capitalist bastard they got on well enough with.
All of them drank steadily as if they knew that was what they were here for. Their three girls sat in bikinis on the coaming of the forward cabin, the one in which old Mr. Kozinski and Paul sometimes said they’d be happy to live while sailing the Pacific. None of the women were shy, but the young Mrs. Kate Kozinski noticed that they didn’t know each other at all. They were trying out each other’s unfamiliar names, whereas the men standing around Paul at the helm closely knew each other’s names and were onto other matters: reflections and anecdotes.
These women who had never before spent any time with each other all smoked hard, just as the men around the helm drank hard. When the young Mrs. Kozinski went forward to socialize with them, she could smell the cigarette chemicals which their hair had filtered out of the air.
Even with her boots full of the serious waters of the Myambagh flood, she remembered the names of two of these women. She handled both names as if they were flat stones. She saw both sides of the stones. Denise and Chantelle. The name of the third would not come to Kate on this spirit-laden water.
For some parts of their conversations, they dropped their voices. For others they were boisterous. Their main talk with Kate Kozinski was about how they liked the boat. She saw that they all seemed to shave their pubic hair, for some of the shaven spikiness of it was in each case visible above the line of their bikini bottoms.
Extraordinary that she should now have such a sharp memory of three women with shaven pubes, two of them called Denise and Chantelle. Extraordinary that the day of the women on the Vistula, along with the memory of Mrs. Kozinski screaming at gravesides, was all she had brought with her on the road.
All three women made a casual loud fuss of the children. The children had tested the fuming, near-naked, loud and discreet girls with a couple of their best tricks. Siobhan stood on her hands on the roof of the forward cabin, extending her legs in the air, so that the V of her body could have served as a navigational directive to her father at the wheel. Bernard Kozinski showed how fast he could do half a lap of the deck, pounding forward on his flat feet to the bows, then aft to level with his father, who applauded him from the helm.
The girls twisted on their thighs and yelled at the children, Clever boy! and, I wish I could do that!
The children could tell all this was just politeness, a break in the women’s absorption in each other. And so both went down into the cockpit instead, to get an occasional flurry of notice there, to listen to the men’s stern, barking chatter.
And again this choice made by the children showed that the women on the forward coaming wanted to give most of their attention to getting to know each other, whereas the men already did and had therefore space to devote to handstanders like Siobhan.
Paul and the deckhand hauled the Vistula around West Head and anchored in a limpid bay called Jerusalem. They let down the platform aft. From it it was possible to go swimming. The prospect prompted the three women to put their shirts back on.
—Aren’t there sharks? they asked at various stages. Paul assured them as he assured all visitors. No one had ever been taken by a shark in Pittwater or in this part of the Hawkesbury. Look, his own children were already in swimming. What long clean strokes Siobhan made. She knew the water was sharkless. Bernard swam more hectically, bobbing upright every twenty frantic strokes to take breath, but getting a smile on his face, tickled pink to find the kindly air was there, and utterly unafraid of predators.
The woman called Chantelle hugged her shirt to her.
—They’re so lucky. Living near the water. Makes all the difference to kids.
Paul came down to the galley, where Mrs. Kate Kozinski had now begun shelling prawns and sundering chicken for lunch.
—You know, you don’t have to be anything more than polite to them, he told her as if he was worried Kate and the women might become friends. They aren’t lost cousins.
She got a little peevish and argued that anyone who came on the boat, anyone it was worth spending Sunday with, deserved a basic courtesy. She asked if the women knew each other, it didn’t seem they did?
—I don’t know, he said. I only asked them along to keep the boys happy.
She was going to ask what that meant but he smiled excessively, the disarming Slav, and thundered up the companionway again.
When lunch was ready and she went on deck to tell them, Paul had already gone. She could see that he was rowing the three union men and their girlfriends ashore to a little beach beneath the nearly vertical façade of bush and sandstone. Everyone had then vanished into the bush except Paul and the deckhand, who sat on the beach like servants, chatting. Of the unionists and the others there was no sign now. Both the children sat listlessly in the cockpit.
—He didn’t let us go with him, Siobhan complained to Kate.
Kate said it didn’t matter. You come swimming with me. So she stepped with them onto the grating which had been lowered from the stern, and all three of them took to the water. Habitués, both children. The union officials and the shaven-groin women did not have that competence.
Soon they all descended from the bush: the three unionists, their girlfriends. Dropping down through the ancient flora, amongst the banksias, olive green and black and gray, knobbly and bristling with black cones. From her buoyant place amongst the swimming children, Kate saw them on the beach, saw Paul and the deckhand rise to greet them. While her husband and the deckhand were rowing the guests back to her, she took her mouthful of the deep, brown, brackish, clay-laden estuary water, retained it in her mouth for long enough to give a sense of its full character, and then released it.
The night of the Vistula day, once the children were asleep, she told Paul that she would not go on any more cruises like that. Not with Siobhan and Bernard, and not without them either. They were procured tarts, she said. Chantelle and Denise and the one whose name, by the time she drank from Myambagh’s flood, she could not have recalled.
She remembered this argument not in the painstaking way in which she had remembered the women and her mouthful of brackish water. She remembered it only in general terms. It was the standard argument between them.
Paul: Kozinski Constructions was the basis of their lives, above all of her leisure to be the supreme mother. Yes, you could call the women whores if you wanted. That was why she’d heard one of them say, as they made themselves up and combed their hair in the bedroom behind the galley, that she had always worked for Kozinski Constructions. But did Kate think the world was an idyll? Did she think her children could be protected for good from the commerce of the flesh and the allied commerce of bricks and cement? She kept her children hostage in an unreal world, and for one day, without knowing anything about it, without suffering any harm, they had inhabited the true world. So if the union officials had had small erotic adventures up on the sandstone ledges, that sort of goodwill went into Kozinski projects and paid for Mrs. Kate Kozinski’s great motherhood project, which was strangling her children to death!
This was the question, then in Palm Beach and tonight on the Eglington Highway: Had she been the one who took her children’s air from them? In Myambagh she had been growing out of that idea, not fast enough but fueled at least by all Jack Murchison’s old-fashioned food.
Waiting for Gus to vivify the signwriter’s engine, she lowered her hand and stirred the cold waters of Jelly’s dissolution.
Kate, arguing on the Vistula evening: She believed the Kozinskis liked doing business the way they did it. Would not have wanted to operate under any other system. The snaky corruption of the old world dancing along nicely with the hairy-arsed corruption of the new! She wasn’t afraid of the realities of life in the construction business. She believed Siobhan and Bernard should be exempt though from being patronized by women bought by the hour to perform favors for building trade unionists in Jerusalem Bay.
(Becoming heated)
The next time he wanted to award union officials a boatload of women, he ought to provide one for himself!
But again, calf deep in floodwater, stirring it with her hand, she remembered the women and the estuarine water far more intimately than she remembered the fight with Paul. Maybe he was right: he always counted for less.
She did remember one point she had made: that old Mr. Kozinski wouldn’t have put his own wife aboard a boat where the frank exchange of bodies was the order of the day. Old Mr. Kozinski might be corrupt, but he knew the protocols, the decorousness necessary for doing business that way. Paul was too Australian and did not have any grasp of the etiquette of tainted business.
Gus seemed to be enjoying himself within the limits of this astounding night. He said he was now ready to start the engine by any means necessary, but would she look under the rear bumper bar to see if the signwriter had taped a spare key there. And yes, wading out of the water to the high and dry rump of the vehicle, she ran her hand along the underside of the blade of bumper bar and the key was there.
Carrying it thickly in cold fingers, Kate got into the cabin and turned on the ignition as instructed by Gus. There was a throaty shudder from the engine. Hearing it, Gus laughed. He knew that after a few more convulsions, the engine would start outright. And so it happened. Gus shut the hood, the triumphant slam of a man used to having his way with machinery. With him urging her with hand motions and taking care of where the beasts were at this stage of their inquiries into the earth, she backed out of the flood.
She got down then from the driver’s seat to see to the loading of the beasts. Gus fed Menzies into the back of the truck in that peculiar way, lengthwise, since there was barely room for him to stand. Menzies reclined on his backward-bending, tucked-under, sticklike legs. He had been trained to do this by the dimensions of so many of the vehicles which had come Gus’s way. Chifley, similarly well trained, stood sagely amongst the paint pots. He had entered a new phase of meditation. He sunk himself for the journey by truck in a style of thought for which no movement was necessary.
Gus rolled down the back door on them, and then as of right, went around to the cabin and took the wheel. Kate in the passenger seat, they drove west. They had a sense of the wide swamps and seas of the western sheep pastures. Semi-arid farming they called it. But not tonight. Rice paddies tonight. Fens.
Gus turned on the radio, and the newsreader began to read statistics about the flood. The unfortunate town of Myambagh. Twice stricken in the one year. Two hundred-year floods in twelve months.
Gus said, The centuries pass bloody quick in Myambagh.
—On a lighter note, said the newsreader. On a lighter note, a kangaroo and an emu up to now employed by the owner of a Dubbo entertainment park to provide the living elements in the tableau of the Australian coat of arms have been stolen. Chifley is a mature, male big gray kangaroo, eight years of age. Menzies is a male emu, nine years old … A police inspector from Dubbo was recorded as saying that this was not being treated as a light matter.
But that did not take the levity out of the news item. For Gus had heard the announcer say, On a lighter note …
—People bloody amaze me. Out of the back of the Railway Hotel, Jack has every dog in Myambagh that hasn’t drowned, and that’s big news, part of the bloody headlines. An act of humanity. That’s not on a lighter note. But a kangaroo and an emu? That’s comedy in some people’s book.
With the aftertaste of the floodwater still in her mouth, Kate considered the issue of what was to be done with this truck in the end? As far as Girilambone, it was licit: a truck Gus had rescued from the flood. After Girilambone, it could be considered stolen. It had the owner’s name—O’Riordan—on the side. The name was a personal plea: don’t take away my instruments of trade just when I’m hardest hit; just when flood, and the decline of towns along all Australia’s aged waterways are narrowing down all business. She could still guess at the desperate feelings of Mr. O’Riordan, prickling with insomniac fear, watching the bush’s one late-night television channel.
It was apparent that Gus too thought of O’Riordan, both nobly and practically. About O’Riordan’s convenience but also about his red and blue name on the sides of the thing. A dead giveaway.
She watched Gus slide his jaw sideways away from his upper mouth, making a crooked gate of teeth.
A tall hayshed presented itself, open to the road, piled high with what even in half-light could be seen as strata of old, brown fermenting hay with blond bales, recently cut, on top. Around such a shed Chifley and Menzies, even if seen from the road, would look au naturel. Even if one was spotted by a passer-by, they would not present themselves to the eye as kidnapped performers.
Kate and Gus abandoned O’Riordan’s van and crossed the wet paddocks to climb in amongst the bales in the hayshed and mount from level to level of stacked hay. As they rose, Menzies stood by the glossy trunk of a she-oak and seemed utterly detached. He might be able to fend for himself in what was sentimentally called the wild. Chifley kept a distance, off amongst the tea trees, but Kate felt the shock again, the phantom of pleasure who always stood there by Chifley’s shoulder.
Gus said, Just watch out for tiger snakes.
Everyone knew tiger snakes spent slothful winters in places like this.
Gus erects a little cold- and windbreak of hay bales. It is a blind, a vantage point. Behind it he and Kate can sleep amidst the blue, pungent miasma rising from the bales. Moisture, heat, the furious bacteriology of cut hay.
Gus has brought the signpainter’s dropcloth with him too, and now spreads it across the surface of the bales.
—Best I can do. Sorry to say, it’s pretty spiky. Not the Hilton bloody Hotel. Sorry to say.
About to sleep, Gus remembers Jelly every few seconds.
—What about poor Jelly, eh?
There seems to Kate to be a large black-blue space in the corner of the shed which is Jelly’s absence. She feels the substance of his loss, the changed world, rather than any active frenzy. It is the weight that is awful. Again she looks to the idea that Chifley might lift it.
Kate and Gus, utterly dusted, have crept into each other’s arms, Kate in the chaste widowhood of the detonation she can still feel like a block of wood in her stomach and in either eardrum. Gus is reliably a gentleman, following the virtues which he picked up together with his farm mechanics from his battler father. Out in the seeping coldness, Menzies is asleep on his locked knee joints. Amongst the tea trees, Chifley sprawls for a moment, his enormous legs spread. Kate is always aesthetically offended by an image of Chifley in repose. Never did he look so much like a beast of hindleg-heavy imbalance as he does now. She wants him to give her the consolation and easy air of bounding, the air which over-brims with every bound instead of, as in the human model, being emptied out. There is no air for her in the image of his repose.
North of the Darling, on the Schulberger farm, now owned and tended by Gus and his sister-in-law, stands a 1920s derelict building. It dates from a time of hearty intentions. Australia contributed to a fantastically remote war in Europe a larger number of its youth than did most of the real combatants, two out of three of these boys from the bush being casualties. Trying to say: here we are, here we are! Europe in the South Seas! Redeemed convicts! True Britons all, even the Irish!
The nation rewarded its returning heroes by giving them slabs of desert and the proud name Soldier Settler. Most of them farmed bravely on, sticking in the agrarian trenchline until the crash of 1929, or in some cases until the great drought at the start of another World War in the 1940s.
Gus’s and his late brother’s place has one remaining Soldier Settler homestead standing on it, and is in fact made up of two abandoned Soldier Settler farms of about two and a half thousand acres each. The abandoned house, far from the homesteads of Gus and his brother, has timber floors with ancient linoleum still stuck on them, and beneath the linoleum the newspapers of a hopeful year. The family who gave up the homestead in the end has left behind very few exhibits or artifacts, but the most notable is a white and black banded snake preserved in kerosene in a large jam jar.
Occasional iron bedsteads still stand as well—they belonged to children who perished of diphtheria or pneumonia or polio, and whom the parents were too weary to replace. Such are the beds to which Gus and Kate travel.
In Australia movement is not westward to the center but eastward to the coast. Australia is periphery. It dreams of and yet abandons the core. So that the furniture removal trucks, when met, and even discounting the flood, are moving all the time in the wrong direction for Gus and Kate and the beasts.
The sleeping Kate has with better success than she imagines become the woman she wanted to become. Her hands are begrimed still and cut about from shoveling and bagging sand. Her hair is lank and damp, and the roots would not tolerate too exact an inquiry. She smells of sweat and unchanged underwear and mold. If the Prime Minister saw her, he would not know her now. He would not be able to say, Gidday Kate, still voting for me?
While cutting up vegetables in Connie Murchison’s kitchen, Kate, coming across references to Kozinski Constructions and small pictures of Paul or his father, would quickly enough start to fold the paper on itself over the scraped skins of carrots or the tops of onions or turnips.
But one brisk morning, she did see something she wanted to read and it was not to do with the not-so-Reverend Frank. She moved an eggshell to see the item better. It had to do with a man already mentioned in this account: Frank Pellegrino, film-maker and early lover of Kate.
Pellegrino was an anomaly, an Adelaide Sicilian. In some senses there was no more un-Sicilian a city than Adelaide. It started not as a convict settlement but as a yeoman-based experiment in progress. It had always lifted its skirts clear of the mad Irish-cum-Cockney convictry of Sydney. It prided itself on its British probity rather than on its Sicilians, except that Pellegrino couldn’t be ignored. He was one of the young directors who had emerged in Kate’s early adolescence and who sometimes expressed gratitude to Jim Gaffney for giving them a run in his cinemas against the advice of his board, and whose talent made a claim on everyone.
There was a pre-existent bond—to do with Jim Gaffney’s reputation—between Kate and Pellegrino.
Pellegrino’s youth had been spent making television commercials but dreaming, of course, of the feature film. He unleashed his cameraman, a Croatian from Melbourne named Rapotec, on the sublime desolations of Central Australia, and he confessed always to wishing that what they saw through the viewfinder of the Croatian’s camera could be employed to narrate tales rather than to sell petroleum products. He had made his first feature film for less than half a million dollars in one of the old Cornish copper mining towns in the South Australian wilderness. His film was chosen by the international jury for showing at the Cannes Film Festival. No sooner was it seen and misunderstood by Hollywood than he was desperately yearned for, and within a few years he was living in Beverly Hills and making studio films, two of which won Academy Awards for various of his technicians and actors, and one of which earned him an Oscar for himself.
Kate met him when the winning film reached Australia. She took him over in fact at the airport, as was her job, led him through a press conference, got him into his hotel, supervised his itinerary and accompanied him to every large city in the Commonwealth for premieres of his film. A number of women in Bernard Astor’s office and in the film distribution business in general warned her at cocktail parties to be careful of him. He had a pleasant, larrikin style. In it he liked to conduct the whole palaver of seduction.
She found him however to be a defenseless, short man, negligently dressed. He was exhausted by the flight from California. He confided in her in an urgent whisper how he had been kept awake by the terror of coming home.
—This is a bloody tough country to come back to, he would say again and again.
She told him that all the nation was proud of him and felt included in his success.
He said, That’s the ordinary people, love. What about the culture police? They’re going to ask me why I went to America, why I made American movies, when I’m going to come home. As if Australian bloody films had been available for me to make, once they’d worked the industry over. I know I’m going to get the big question, and there’s no answering it.
All the critics who met him at press conferences were genial however, and didn’t ask the questions he feared.
—Jesus, love, he confided in her. I think this bloody country might be changing for the better.
His tentative exhilaration began to color all the meals they had together, all the jokes they shared in the lifts and corridors of all the good hotels. She began to indulge that perilous feeling that she’d known him since childhood.
But he was still tremulous about the premiere in his own home city.
—Not a big Dago city, love. Not even a big Irish one either. The only bloody state of Australia where the Anglos still hold the redoubts.
But the Adelaide acclaim was so full-throated that she could see the final ropes of tension dissolve in his face. His parents attended a great post-screening melee in a vast marquee by the banks of the Torrens. She’d been expecting to see workworn Sicilian market gardeners, but they were in fact two stylish retired restaurant managers. Their quiet, well-ordered elation reduced him safely in her eyes to the status of son rather than director. She forgave him the slight vanity by which he’d represented the parents to her as hapless and bewildered peasants.
Back in the hotel, in the corridor, he took her easily into his arms. She could smell on his breath the sourness, the enormous amount he had drunk to protect himself from failure.
—Marry me, he said with vinous ardor.
He meant it of course, and she knew he would continue to for the rest of the tour. He was the sort of man who said these extreme things easily, and then went to a lot of trouble to believe them for a day or two. He remained a devoted lover from Adelaide to Perth and then back to Sydney. Sitting in planes he would touch her helplessly and gaze at her and praise her. It was all of such a high octane that there was a kind of relief when at last, with a keen but feigned wistfulness, he got on the plane to go back to Beverly Hills. He had to face up there to the berserk expectations he had raised by winning an Academy Award.
An altered Kate moved an eggshell to read in the kitchen of Murchison’s Railway Hotel a feature on her old three-city lover, Pellegrino. His picture on the page on which she was about to roll things brought back a reminiscent dry flutter behind her ribs, a serpent turning over in husks of corn. The feature said his last film, The Reaper, story of a crime passionnel on a Texas farm, had done poorly. It had received no nominations at all, and had lost money and been badly reviewed.
The feature quoted Pellegrino as saying, I think my impetus as a director was based on the fact that I came from so far away. Now I’ve probably been too long absent from my Australian well-springs. I want to go back, gather myself, and make one beautiful Australian film.
The beautiful Australian film he wanted to make was a novel by one Bruno Casey. In summary it didn’t seem so surefire a story. An Australian woman runs a farm in western New South Wales during World War II while her husband is away in the Southwest Pacific. Her husband’s elderly parents are also partners to this arrangement: her husband’s older version therefore helps her run the place. Assigned an Italian prisoner of war as a farm laborer, the woman falls in love with him. Her husband is crippled in a jeep smash on Bougainville. It had all to be in the telling.
The film was to be shot in western New South Wales on a property called Craigholme northwest of Cobar.
Kate wakes, feeling at first tireder than the aged western plains. But her remembered information restores her all at once.
Gus wakes too and groans and says, It’s cold.
But he lets go of her and is embarrassed for what she will think of him.
She asks, Do you know the properties around here?
Gus confessed to having worked on some of them. He was a remarkable man, willing to answer any question in good faith on first awakening.
—Do you know one called Craigholme?
—Oldest bloody property in the district, said Gus as if it were one of the fundamental data of geography.