KALGOORLIE TO PERTH, 10.40 PM TO 9.10 AM
The Indian Pacific pulls out of the gold-town in the desert, leaving behind budding desire and beginning trust.
Jack Pollard’s card is covered with very small, neat writing:
I met Jack on the Indian Pacific. We had dinner on the train, then at Tran’s in Kalgoorlie. He wants to meet me again. I am to ring him when I am ready.
Under his phone number on the front, Jack has written:
Desire does not recognise time.
Desire line: the easiest track between where you are and where you want to be. Home Ground and Omorfi Thea farms were crisscrossed by desire lines—visible ones made by generations of sheep and cattle finding the water troughs and feed-drop places, invisible ones between the families’ houses.
Desire can be fierce and demanding sexual love, or a long, slow craving for some other thing that is more nebulous but just as needful. Jack had said everything has its opposite, and she had wanted both. She wanted the life that Coe promised—belonging, family, a home, a garden—but even then she had felt the pull of an opposing force, was drawn to chaos, the unexpected, the terror of discovery.
Cassandra Aberline knows about desire and its problems.
Nineteen sixty-seven. Cassie started an arts degree in literature. She’d never had any yearning to teach English, but she had to do something, and she knew she wasn’t needed—and nor did she want to be—at Home Ground, where Alec and Helen managed very well. She felt out of place when she went home now, as if her roots had shrivelled, and the loose ground around them was falling away.
Alec asked her, the day after she finished high school, what she was going to do. The answer had popped out of her mouth—a degree in literature—as if it had been waiting there all along. She knew that wherever Coe was, that was where she would be.
Fine, her father said. The farm can support you for three years. After that you’re on your own. I’ve already talked with Mary and Hec, because I thought you’d want to do something in the city, and you can live at the cottage with Coe and Dion.
Hec had wondered how they would arrange things for the three of them, and she told him she would put a bed and a desk in the small storeroom off the back verandah. And so she did, using the room as a study and even sleeping there occasionally during those few months she spent there.
When the three went home for the midyear holidays, Cassie found the anti–Vietnam War sentiment she’d seen on campus had taken hold at Home Ground. The nightly news broadcast was all bombs and gunfire and smoke, and excited reporters ducking for cover as they told the day’s body count. How did they know that: how many they’d killed? Alec would turn the television off. We don’t need that with our dinner, he’d say. Enough to give a man indigestion.
At Omorfi Thea things were much the same. The Americans seem to be targeting the people in the villages, just like the Nazis did in Greece, Mary said. And where do the people go when their little village has disappeared?
Hec, too, refused to have war brought into his house: Don’t need killing in my lounge room.
On their return to their cottage on the river, Dion, Coe, and Cassie pooled a little money each, bought a second-hand television set, and watched the news every night. Dion would open a bottle of beer, then another.
Is Dion all right? Cassie asked Coe.
Dion was not all right. He was restless, complaining his life was boring, that uni was boring and why did he need it anyway? It’s all very well for you two lovey-doveys, he’d say, but I need something else, a bit of excitement.
His restlessness rubbed off on Coe and Cassie. When they walked along the riverbank to the pub where Dion tried to find ‘something else’, Coe matched him glass for glass and joint for joint. Cassie tagged along but found she did not like the loss of control that came with alcohol or pot, so she would walk there with the brothers but often left early, leaving them at the bar or on the lawn that rolled down to the river.
During those last few months she wondered, more than once, what was happening to the young men she thought she knew so well. Why the drinking and smoking and general lack of interest in—well, in anything, really, especially their engineering course. She knew Dion had just pulled through his midyear exams.
What’s happening? she asked Coe. When will all this boozing end? It’s Dion’s problem, not ours—let him deal with it.
Maybe not your problem, he’d said, but he’s my brother. I have to watch out for him.
You’re not watching out, you’re joining him. He’s turning you into him.
Maybe I am. Maybe he is. Maybe I need to be more like him instead of …
Instead of what? Of being with me?
Forget it, Cass. It’s our stuff, not yours. Butt out.
She’d fought with Dion too.
He was maudlin-drunk, one particular night at the pub, and had reached the last line of the chorus of the lament always sung at such times:
For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.
You’ve both done wrong, she’d said, and walked off. She knew, all too well, that Dion’s follow-up line would come next. But I never do anything wrong, he’d shout. I’m bloody well perfect.
As she left, Coe joined his brother as he started the song again, their two voices, so alike, making something strangely sweet and plaintive. Cassie was in no mood to stay and listen.
Later that night, she’d been deep into the first of the two Shakespeare plays on her reading list for that semester when Dion slammed into her tiny room and picked up Romeo and Juliet from her desk.
The star-crossed young lovers, he said—had to read this in high school. S’pose you think that’s you and Coe, don’t you? Young lovers in a soppy story.
Don’t be stupid, and you’re drunk. Go away—I don’t need your stroppy mood.
Nope. Dion waved the play script around. This old bloke knew a thing or two about sex, didn’t he? Wrote about it all the time.
Love. He wrote about love.
Love, sex. No difference. Dion dropped the book on the floor and took the one she was reading from her hand. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he said. Another one about sex! Who’d have thought it—the man was obsessed with it! Trouble is, in this one they all have to be doped up, otherwise they don’t know who is who and it all gets very confusing.
It’s a love potion, Dion. A love potion is hardly dope.
What else would it be, then? Sounds awfully dopey to me. Wonder if it was a love potion Coe was using when he took my place with Helen last holidays. Wonder if Helen even knew it was him, not me. Wonder if you, Cassandra Knowall, know he’s in love with her, not you? But you wouldn’t, would you. Better open those dewy eyes and see what’s really around you.
She hadn’t believed him—couldn’t believe him! Coe and Helen? Never. Cassie would have noticed something, surely, maybe a pulling away or a coldness, but that hadn’t happened. Dion would say anything to annoy her—he was jealous of what she and Coe had.
Only two days later—Cassie remembers it all too well—Dion flung himself onto the other end of the couch where she was reading. Joined the army today, he said. Going in next week.
How could you do that! And you’re too young, anyway.
Eighteen now, nineteen by the end of training. Old enough to serve overseas—in Vietnam.
Just wait until you tell Hec. He’ll let you know what it’s about—you’d better be prepared to duck! What a bloody stupid thing to do.
Oh, yeah? Well, Miss Knowall, Coe’s coming too.
Cassie turned to Coe, who was standing in the doorway. He looked away, turned around, and left.
They went home the next day. Cassie loaded her books into the car boot. Dion and Coe had only a duffle bag each—they would not be studying. She had not asked Coe anything at all—why he’d done it. Why he hadn’t told her himself instead of leaving it to Dion. And he had not told her a thing. She felt bereft, as if he had left already. Or maybe it was something else, and she couldn’t find the words to describe such a thing.
The trip home was silent. Coe drove, Dion slept in the back seat, and Cassie watched the world change from coastal plains to hilly forest to open country that swept away east to the inland.
Sundown had become twilight when they pulled up at Omorfi Thea, where Mary and Hec waited on the verandah, Mary with her gin and tonic, and Hec his beer. Cassie stayed in the car—she wanted nothing to do with what was coming—and Coe hung back too, stopping at the bottom of the verandah steps as Dion sprang past him and dropped into a chair next to Mary.
Something to tell you, he said. We’ve joined up. Army.
Mary half-rose from her chair, then fell back.
Hec looked at Dion, then at Coe. You can’t do that, he said. You’re too young.
Nineteen soon, Hec, older than you were, Mary said. She stood up, as if to confront a coming storm. They want to go, and maybe good men are needed. We can’t stop them.
There was no storm, but Cassie remembers the look on Hec’s face, and despair and betrayal are not strong enough words for what she saw—what she sees still, as she thinks about that moment. She remembers, too, what Coe said as he drove her to Home Ground.
I have to go, Cass. I have to look out for Dion. Mary told us both that. Look out for each other, she said. And you have to watch out for Helen—she’s not as strong as you, I think.
Now, Cassie wonders if she had a twinge of doubt then—maybe Dion had been right? She can’t recall hearing Coe worry about Helen’s wellbeing ever before. She does remember her response, though: You don’t know her very well, do you? She’s as tough as an old boot. And I haven’t seen Dion looking out for you too often. It’s always the other way around.
Maybe it’s because you don’t want to see it, Coe said.
And that was that.
They left a few days later for the barracks at the edge of the Indian Ocean, then to Puckapunyal in Victoria. Twelve weeks later they went to fight in Vietnam.
On the day after Coe and Dion left for the army, Cassie got up at daybreak and walked the familiar track across the paddock to Omorfi Thea, where she knew Hec would be in the kitchen making his breakfast: two eggs, bacon and tomatoes with three slices of toast.
I may not be their sister, she said as she chopped banana into a bowl of weetbix, but I can do most of the things they should be doing here during uni breaks. And I’m not going back to uni either. It’s fine with Dad, so you may as well let me stay.
And so she did.
She missed the noise and energy of the twins around the house, but, truth be told, the taciturn Hec was a balm after the recent turmoil in the cottage, and the deep quietude of the land settled her soul. Over that first summer, she found a somewhat peaceful place in herself.
Farm work is farm work: feeding animals, ploughing, seeding, harvesting, each year the same. She liked working with the cattle, and walked Hec’s prize Angus bull around the ring at the Perth Agricultural Show, taking second place. But as weeks turned to months, and months into a second year, she found herself restless.
You ever been to Sydney, Hec?
Nope.
Never wanted to? Why don’t you take Mary on the new train? She’d love that. Seems lots of people are booking already for when it starts in February.
Nope. Once away from here was enough.
But Cassie seemed to think as often about the glittering city across the inland as about a life in this farmhouse with Coe Blanchard.
Letters came, to Mary and Hec from them both, to Helen from Dion, to Cassie from Coe. She has one still, and now she takes it from its protective folder in her backpack. There is no address, no date, but the date it arrived is written on the outside fold: 15 August 1969.
Dear Cassie,
It’s impossible to say how much I miss you. Today is probably the worst day I have ever lived in my entire life. This morning Dion and I were talking about how short a time a half of a second is, here it’s the difference between life and death, and today we lost three from our unit. I feel it was because I was that half second too slow. This is hell and we are the Devil’s disciples. I remember those sermons Eric Ackerman used to give (remember how your dad used to call him the poof!) and how we laughed that he always seemed to choose texts about war and fighting, and then talk against them. I know now it was no laughing matter. He was a kid during WW2, wasn’t he, and must have seen things no kid should. There sure are kids here seeing things they should never see. And kids are dying because ‘our side’ goes into villages and wipes them out. It breaks my heart.
And if anything happens to me (it won’t, but just in case it does) Dion and I have made a pact that he’ll take care of you. And vice versa, of course, I’ll look after Helen if he gets it. Just in case. I’m glad we’ve been together in the same unit, although none of the officers ever knows who he’s speaking to! No one else does either, so nothing’s changed. But we do expect to be home very soon anyway, we’re close to finishing this tour and I will get to see you soon.
C x
Cassie has not yet answered it.
She debated these ideas in her first-year philosophy class, in the few months she attended university:
You are not you except in relation to others.
If there were no other people, you wouldn’t exist.
You are the actions you take.
She doesn’t much like any of them, but can see a reason for the last one.
She rips open her backpack and scrabbles through it, looking for the notebook she knows is in there.
Her handwriting is smooth and looping, her hand steady:
This is Cassandra Aberline with pen in hand. I thought I knew who I am. It seems, now, that I may not.
Outside the speeding train is only darkness. In her platinum carriage, Cassie looks in the mirror, and what does she see? Will she recognise herself in ten years’ time? Or even one year? Or next week? She touches her shoulder blade, where Bammy tattooed the feather and the shenu. The feather is truth, and flight—the Indians reckon it’ll help you talk with the spirits, he’d said. The shenu protects the person whose name’s inside. I reckon you need all the protection you can get.
She remembers Bammy’s voice, gravelly and rough. She remembers the tiny third tatt, a capital letter written small, but cannot, at the moment, recall which letter it is, nor the name of the street woman for whom she had it inscribed on her skin.
She must bring her tired mind to the central thing, to the question she has been avoiding for so many years: who and why. First, try to separate Coe from Dion, Dion from Coe, because, maybe—she is prepared to have a little doubt—just maybe she could have confused them. Maybe they were much more alike than she thought. She wishes she could talk with Mary now.
I know you and Coe are a couple, Mary had said to Cassie, one quiet evening while her sons were away. I’ve known for a long time, maybe before either of you did. Hec doesn’t realise, of course, but he never sees things that are under his nose. He doesn’t need to know, yet—maybe when they come home. You can still tell who’s who?
Oh, yes, Cassie said, even more now, but I still don’t know how I know.
For me too, Mary said. I just know.
Two peas in a pod, two dicky birds on a wall. What differences, then, could the two women see? Neither of them could say.
It’s late, but there is no time for Cassie to sleep. She must try to work out why no one could see any difference between Coe and Dion Blanchard.
Physically, they were both tall and strong—taller than their father, taller than Alec Aberline. Mary’s cooking did it, was the family joke. Thick black hair inherited from Mary, hazel-green eyes from Hec, identical lip and ear shape. The backs of their necks were reddish and crinkled, in an identical pattern, from years of exposure to the inland sun.
Around the district the Blanchard brothers were known as the tearaway twins, unfairly so, as it was Dion whose boisterous instinct was for noise and violence. He was one of those sudden storms that appear darkly on the horizon and before you know it the flash and fire of lightning is all around you, bringing down trees, lighting the occasional haystack or paddock of stubble, then passing, leaving clear skies behind.
Those who had been caught up in Dion’s tumult would think, afterward, that he had apologised, but it was Coe, the calm peacemaker, who would call, or drop by, and restore harmony. No one knew it was not Dion in a quiet mood, and Coe never disabused them.
Cassie wonders, now, how that could be—why no one would have realised.
For Cassie, there was no more obvious difference between the brothers than in their music. Both played piano, thanks to the persistence of their mother. Dion’s other choice was the trumpet, raucous and attention-seeking, and played with more verve than ability—while Coe spent hours playing scales and exercises on his clarinet, or just doodling, making his own tunes. But they both liked country and western, particularly anything by Marty Robbins. This was the music the town heard them sing in the local pub, not the Bach or the Wagner, the clarinet or the trumpet.
Another difference: when Dion whistled the farm dogs they had to be called and called, then they came slowly, and jumped straight on the back of the truck. When Coe called they were there in an instant, all around him, waiting for his approval.
Dion must have had some good in him, Cassie thinks now, and Coe was not all sweetness and light. Neither was all black nor all white, but memory tells what memory tells.
Five am, and the Indian Pacific tears across the plains, held true to its course by two thin strips of metal. Cassie hears the drawn-out warning wail of the horn—they might have reached the north crossing—and she raises the window blind expecting to see the ghost of an old farm truck drive slowly towards Dalyaniny Siding. Slowly, because the girl at the wheel knew that any sudden bump or lurch on the unsealed road would shatter her into shards and slivers. That’s what happens when you are fragile: you break easily. And so she had concentrated on the rough road because her life depended on it.
As the train rounds a sweeping bend, there’s a faint pink line at the eastern horizon and she knows that soon the sun will leap out of the earth as a huge red ball, before it settles into its daily routine.
In the early light she sees rows and rows of olive trees; paddocks full of olive trees. Snippets of a conversation come to mind: the Blanchard dinner table, Coe saying to his father that he has read about olives, and how they grow well in the dry heat of the wheat belt.
Hec was dismissive. We do well with sheep and wheat, and the cattle stud’s going well.
Stupid idea, Dion said. Why don’t we just stay with what we know?
Gary knocks on her door, brings in a breakfast tray. Last time, Ms Aberline. We’ll be in Perth soon. Do you have someone meeting you?
No, no one. I didn’t expect to have to stay over, but it seems I must.
You know the terminal’s some way from the city, don’t you? Would you like me to arrange for a taxi to meet you?
Yes, please. You’ve been wonderful, Gary—thank you for everything you’ve done. Over and above the call of duty, I’d say, and very much appreciated.
She had imagined her search for the truth would have been done by the time the Indian Pacific reached its destination, and that she’d be on a plane back to Sydney today. That was her expectation, but inconstant memory has not cooperated—it has twisted and turned, throwing up irrelevant and forgotten things, and so she has to stay.