I
It was still dark when Susannah got up to make the salt-beef sandwiches. She wrapped John’s lunch in greaseproof paper and put it in the cold room. She placed the other sandwiches in the small foam esky. She was looking forward to the trip to town. John opened the flywire door. He didn’t bother to take off his hat.
‘You got a full tank and I checked the oil,’ he said.
‘What about the tyres?’ she asked, feeling his eyes on her as she put away the tomato sauce.
He was watchful. He had been ever since Laura left for the stock camp. Susannah knew why, of course, but she was never going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. There was no point. It wouldn’t lead anywhere or change anything.
‘There are two spares,’ he replied.
She wiped the bench and the lino tabletop again. All she had to do was wake up the boys and put them in the car.
‘You got that list for O’Malley?’
‘Yes,’ she said, her shoulder brushing his as she passed him in the doorway.
She stepped onto the lawn, noticing the hint of light behind the hills. Small birds, erratic and cheerful, darted in different directions. She placed the esky and her handbag in the ute and went back for the boys. John left the house for the work sheds, the brim of his hat tilted towards the ground. She thought of her father and wondered what he was doing. Perhaps he wouldn’t be up yet. The sun appeared, roughly in the direction she would be travelling, and transformed the sky into coloured ripples of cloud.
The wheels slid a little on the loose stones. Following the track as it curved around the thick body of a tree, she remembered the red ribbon of dirt, highlighted by headlights, as it unravelled before them the night they arrived. But she hadn’t been able to see the tall rocky outcrops that sloped away from the road. Sunlight spread from a gap between the hills and lit the spinifex clumps, glowing yellow and bright, outlined by green and the copper-coloured grasses in between. The dirt was iron red. White posts signalled the end of the driveway and the ute slowed for the cattle grid. She glanced at the boys and they all vibrated over the bars as they drove across it, laughing together. The glove box opened and a couple of cassettes fell out onto the floor. She turned towards town onto a road that was barely more than a track; the tyres rattled on top of rocks
Texas and caused the wheel to shake and her hands that gripped it. She drove slowly and carefully, slipping into the grooves carved by other vehicles, trying to prevent the wheels from sliding. She had to concentrate. Otherwise she might think about John and Laura and imagine what had happened between them. On both sides of the road was a chaotic tangle of grass and sharp-angled rock that looked as though it was cut from a quarry. She didn’t blame John really. How could she? It was probably her own fault. She should have been more cheerful. But just thinking like that made her feel so tired.
The hills had ridges like scar tissue and gullies and cracks through them that would have been carved by heavy rushing water. Trees stood out from the slopes like spindly twigs reaching for the sky, with ground-cover grasses the same colour and texture as the coarse bleached hair of a surfer. In places the grass was burnt and white snappy gums seemed naked amongst the new shoots of green. In the distance a red hill was like a lump of clay, set hard before it could be moulded. A blackened tree stump became a rearing horse. Rough dark bark, livid green leaves. A Buddha created by termites squatted beneath the trees. More mounds like the wet sand sculptures she remembered some children making on a beach. She had forgotten that holiday. Lying beside John on that beach, the two of them sharing a towel, and when he sat up, brushing the sand from his shoulders. She blinked quickly. It was another time, before there were children. She remembered he had been so attentive that weekend, away from his job. They’d driven to the sea while the overseer’s cottage was being painted. They stayed in an old two-storey hotel set back from the beach and because the bar was full of young surfers, they sat out on the veranda and he told her his plans and she thought his plans were enough for both of them. She wiped the corners of her eyes. There was no way back now.
Her eyes narrowed. There was something on the road ahead.
It was a bullock. She slowed, knowing it would move away as they got closer. A horned head turned towards her; the beast was tall with enormous front quarters that curved into a small pelvis. A meatworker steer. The car was crawling. Beside the road cattle sheltered under a tree, tails flicking their rumps.
She changed out of gear and revved the engine. The bullock sprang up and trotted into the bush. The wheel was slippery. It reminded her of the night they arrived. She looked across at the boys, who weren’t big enough to see out of the window. Every now and then the road dipped for a creek. Mostly they were dry gullies but sometimes there was a puddle at the bottom to skim through. Later in the year when the rains came, swollen waterways would cross the country and prevent them from leaving the station. They would see no one for months. It would be just her and John and the children. She knew that if she tried to speak to him he would only get defensive, and then it would be her fault. It was better to leave things as they were.
She became conscious of the tightness between her shoulders.
She breathed deeply and stretched her fingers. Eyes on the road.
Keep your eyes on the road, her mother would say when they drove into town, when she had just got her licence. Keep your eyes on the thin ribbon of bitumen that divided neighbours
Texas from each other, their sown paddocks and the occasional orange flowering tree, the sort of trees drawn by every school-age child for their straight trunk and the simple dense curves of their foliage. They were called Christmas trees, probably for the time of the year they flowered. It was also at Christmas the crops ripened and the air became hazy with heat and dust. Harvesters carved patterns in the paddock like the design made by a shearer’s comb as it peeled the fleece away from the sheep. She could see her mother out of the corner of her eye, sitting where the boys were now, holding her handbag on her knee. She’d be talking about what was needed for the garden, the pantry, her mind too busy to imagine another life.
The sun was directly above when she came to a road sign, signalling that she was reaching a T-junction. Susannah had forgotten there could be other vehicles on the road. She turned onto the bitumen, crossing the white lines which marked the edge of the road, and straightened the wheel, the ute moving smoothly over the hard surface. For the first time since she left the house her body relaxed. She took one hand off the wheel to flick the hair away from her neck. She leant forwards, discovering her back was wet with sweat. The car followed the curve in the road. She noticed tyre marks on the bitumen, then a cow on its back; its feet were in the air, body rounded and solid like a plastic farm animal. A maroon-coloured sedan, abandoned. Its front end crushed. The animal was swollen with gas and she realised that the accident must have happened days ago.
About an hour later they slowed for the speed limit on the outskirts of town. The boys had been kicking each other and now they were hungry even though they’d eaten their sandwiches.
She turned off the road that would take her south and onto the gravel road leading into town. Dust clouded behind as they passed light-coloured fibro houses on stumps and a low-lying motel that seemed to have no windows, palms transplanted perhaps from a desert island, flowering oleanders and a tree she hadn’t seen before with bright yellow blossoms that hung on the end of weeping branches. There were buildings of brown brick and a sign which read Vera’s Fashion. White rendered arches marked the entrance to shops on the corner, and the pavement blocks met end to end over fine red dirt. Above the trees to the north were two craggy hills, their irregular shapes an offence to the regimented lines of the street. She parked in front of the co-op. When she turned off the ignition she remembered she had to drive all the way back again.
The woman in the co-op was expecting her. ‘Do you want any help with the boxes?’ she asked. ‘Look like their dad, don’t they? Nah . . . don’t touch that.
‘How’s the jillaroo working out?’ she continued. ‘She’s from England, isn’t she?’
The shopkeeper’s pencil-thin eyebrows were curved like half-moons. She adjusted her high-waisted jeans over her stomach as she moved away from the till. ‘Are you okay? Your eyes look a bit red.’
‘It’s just the dust,’ mumbled Susannah.
‘It takes a bit of getting used to, doesn’t it?’
The woman had a figure like one of the wide boabs they passed on their way into town.
Texas ‘You don’t hear of many jillaroos around the place,’ the woman continued.
‘She’s had quite a lot of experience on a ranch in France,’ said Susannah.
She didn’t want to think about Laura. The woman’s eyebrows rose a little.
‘What about the people before us? Do you know anything about them?’ asked Susannah quickly.
‘Yes, well . . .’ the shop woman began. ‘The family that built that homestead, they were one of the first mob to bring cattle over the top from Queensland.’ She paused. ‘It’s a shame really you don’t see many owners out here nowadays. Actually there’s a new manager near you. Further out. He’s a horsebreaker and she was the nurse up here. She’s from down south too. I heard she’s got some time on one of the channels, you know, on the Flying Doctor radio, for all you women to talk to each other. I’m not sure how often it is.’
Susannah had been holding the hands of her children tight so they wouldn’t pull anything off the woman’s shelves.
‘Mmm,’ said Susannah, face flushed, feeling slightly disorientated from the drive.
It was the change in perspective; from watching the road as it pulled her towards the horizon, to everything being close-up and closed in. The stores were stacked in cardboard boxes at the back of the shop.
‘I’ve packed a few extra things I thought you might not realise you need. You’ll be in again next month?’
‘I hadn’t really thought. I don’t know.’
‘Ronnie,’ the woman, her name was Marge, called to a man wheeling cartons of toilet paper in. ‘Help, will you.’
She gave the boys a Chupa Chup each and watched as Susannah put the ute into reverse. Susannah smiled carefully as she pulled out, telling the boys to wave. She drove down the end of the street and around the block. The tavern on the corner appeared closed since the benches in the fenced beer garden were empty. Susannah was back on the road they came in on, a gravel road divided by a patch of grass where people sat in small groups. She passed the pub, turning left and into O’Malley’s yard. The children seemed happy enough in the car, sucking on their lollipops. O’Malley came out from behind the counter, his hand scratching a large stomach, offering a glimpse of pale skin beneath a khaki work shirt. She waited while he read the list.
‘What’s he want all this for?’ he said.
She hadn’t looked at it.
He led her out past the shelving that contained pipes and joints and tools and chemicals, and through the big iron sliding door out into the yard. They stood amongst the fencing wire and star pickets stacked beside rolls of poly pipe, tanks and trough moulds.
He turned his square red face towards her. ‘More wire?’
She shrugged. ‘I think he wants a weaner paddock.’
‘Who’s doing it for him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How soon does he want it?’
‘Soon, I think.’
Texas He stared at her for longer than necessary. She blushed as he headed back towards the shop.
‘There’s a truck going out that way the end of the week. Soon enough, you reckon?’
‘That’ll be fine. Thanks.’
She followed him inside.
‘There’s something else . . . um . . . Can I order some chooks?’
He leant on the counter, watching another customer pull up outside the shop.
‘Don’t recommend it.’ He straightened and looked at her. ‘If the heat doesn’t get them, the olive python will.’
‘Oh.’ She gave a little embarrassed smile and looked away.
He wrote up the account and she signed it.
‘Been out to the dam yet?’
‘No we haven’t.’ She didn’t think John would be interested.
‘Go and have a look. Show you what man is capable of.’
‘Yes I will. Thanks. I’m sorry. The kids are in the car.’
He opened the shop door for her. She looked back as she reached the vehicle but he’d gone. Ned’s swollen eyes peered from above the part-open window. He hiccuped with sobs. Ollie was looking guilty.
‘Bloody hell, can’t leave you two for a bloody second.’
The wheels spun on the loose gravel and she turned onto the road more quickly than she should have for they shot over the graded edge. Out of the corner of her eye she saw them fall. Ollie bumped his head on the door handle. Wailing and screaming. Shit. She slowed down and looked over at them. They kept howling, only one of them hurt, the other in sympathy.
She noticed a track to her right signposted Swimming Beach and followed it, pulling up in front of a timber bench in a clearing surrounded by long grass and tall trees. Beyond the bench was the river, like a mirror that reflected the few white shapes of cloud. After a little while, ripples panned out from a drop of something or perhaps a fish kissing the surface. She had heard of the man-made lake O’Malley was talking about. There had been an article in the rural newspaper she’d worked for, celebrating some anniversary of the time it was built. The wall would be upstream from here. A dry-stone wall built between hills to create an enormous dam. An engineering feat, it said, with so many tonnes of water pushing hard against it. The dam filled when the rains came and the creeks swelled and fed the river that wound through the country before it came up against the wall. She imagined the water gradually leaking out into the country like a sheet pulled up over the land, smothering its history. Slowly rising above the footprints, the places where people camped, where babies were born, where people lived and died, rising above the grass, the rocks, the trees, fences, yards, bores, windmills, workmen’s quarters, sheds, houses. Each feature of the country, man-made or otherwise, belonged to someone’s memory, never to be revisited or added to. Meanings lost over time. She remembered the dam had filled sooner than expected. There wasn’t enough time for the station owners to clean out a homestead that had been in the valley. Part of it had been transported to another site, but the newspaper story said that if you were to dive down below the surface you would dive through trees, past a windmill, then into what was left of the
Texas homestead. And if you put your hand under the tap in the bathroom, you could still feel the water that leaked from it.
Eventually the children came to her, wiping their mucus across her shoulder. Moist faces tucked into her neck. She patted their backs absently. When did it all start? This feeling of being beneath water: slow and cumbersome, every movement met with something thicker than air, some form of resistance she was unable to see. Memories before marriage had become like blurred, exaggerated images. She seemed unable to speak for herself and she didn’t know what she liked or didn’t like any more. Even the clothes she wore seemed to have been chosen by someone else. The children’s bodies pressed against hers. She patted their backs again without thinking.
The children fed the crusts from their sandwiches to little red birds. Crimson finches hopped and nodded, collected and bobbed, disappearing when the food was gone. Reeds rustled and the water soothed. Downstream a hill lay upside down in the river, its redness reflected precisely against a sky that seemed so deep she sensed another existence. She showed the boys a tortoise as it popped up from the shallows. They squealed and it pulled its head in, slipping back into the depths. She left them to paddle in the soft mud. The dark shapes of fish swirled around further out. She emptied the esky and flicked the crumbs onto the river surface. The water boiled as fish with whiskered mouths rose to reach them. She retrieved the children before they walked too far into the water, wiping them down as best she could. They wanted to stay but she had to get going.
There was one more place to stop. As they sat together on the car seat, one was crying, the other angry.
‘Shush. I’ll get you an ice cream. Anything, just be quiet.’
She drove around to the rear of the pub, parking in the shade. A group of people sat cross-legged in the dirt between her and the door. They were noisy and argumentative and a man stumbled out, clutching a bottle in a brown paper bag.
Speaking loudly and rapidly. Another stood up and pushed him. He stumbled easily on the loose gravel, his arm holding the bottle up and away from the dirt.
‘Eh missus. You got a smoke?’ He grinned and removed the old stockman’s hat from his head with an elaborate gesture. She didn’t know where to look.
‘Sorry.’
‘You know,’ he called after her as she moved quickly past, ‘when I been a young fella I ride like cowboy.’
She quickly entered the dark, cool interior of the bottle shop where a man read a newspaper on the counter.
‘Yeah.’ His eyes stayed on the page.
‘Ten cartons of Gold and five of Pepsi. And five bottles of Bundy.’
He reached for the rum and placed it on the counter and then left through the side door. She waited. A few minutes later he returned with some cartons stacked against a trolley.
‘You close by?’
She led him to the vehicle. As he moved out the door he locked it behind him. The same man who asked her for a
Texas cigarette lurched towards them. ‘Eh mate, you got five dollar?’
‘Come on old man. Don’t annoy the lady.’
They reached the back of the vehicle. He turned to Susannah.
‘That old fella, he used to ride bareback at the rodeo. Won it every time. They called him the Eagle.’
‘What station was he on?’
‘He worked all around. The other fellas did too, they don’t work like they used to.’
‘Why’s that?’ she asked as he stacked the grog on the back of the ute.
He shrugged. A light breeze twitched the butterfly leaves of the bauhinia tree and passed through the open windows of the car. Ollie was in the driver’s seat making engine noises, pretending to drive, and Ned was kneeling on the floor, lining up a Matchbox car and a truck along the vinyl folds of the passenger seat. Through the windscreen she could see the group of men they’d been talking about by the door of the bottle shop. They were all standing now. The old guy was facing a younger man, who also wore a stockman’s hat, and she could see from the way he was gesticulating that he was angry about something. Others in the group looked on and then occasionally they glanced back towards the bottle shop door. Someone appeared in the doorway and they moved away. She suddenly felt guilty for watching.
The sun was low when she pulled out onto the main bitumen road. She’d refuelled and organised fuel supplies for the station. It would be dark now when they reached the turnoff and she hoped she’d be able to find it. As she drove, she realised there was something she’d forgotten. She ran through the places and the items she’d either ordered or collected but nothing came to mind so she turned up the volume of the country and western tape that she’d retrieved from the floor. The vehicle rattled over the stones and then she remembered that she hadn’t phoned her father. She’d promised to get in touch in her last letter. He’d be feeding the chooks and putting the dogs away now, although Lucy, the border collie, was allowed inside these days. She used to think she was close to her father, and after her mother’s funeral she’d tried to tell him that she wasn’t happy. ‘You have to make the best of it,’ he said. ‘It’s what your mother would have wanted.’ She didn’t mention it again. But sometimes she wondered why they’d bothered to pay for her education.
She could see her mother helping them move into the married couple’s house on the property where John had been working. Turning over the dirt by the back fence and planting some vegetable seedlings, leaving instructions in her neat rounded writing on how to look after them. She also planted pink geraniums in pots they placed by the door and seeded the lawn. There was no sign of the cancer then. But her mother had known. She said she hadn’t wanted to make a fuss. Not when there had been a wedding to organise. Susannah had brought her mother’s Country Women’s Association cookbook with her. The pages were well worn and there were notes in the columns. It had been her mother’s before her. Not only were there recipes for food but there were instructions on how
Texas to make a tanning mixture for skins, how to wash a fleece, and how to calm the nerves with stout and beetroot. She remembered the title of one of the chapters: Hints that Help in the Home and Preserve the Temper.
She couldn’t think of her mother without seeing the outline of her body under the hospital issue blankets. It was such a shock to see her like that and to realise that her mother was never going to help her plant anything again. Someone had said, or perhaps she’d read it, that the moment before the end was peaceful. She’d tried afterwards to confront it, the destruction of the body. Her mother beneath the ground. It was supposed to be the cycle of life, like the dead lamb in the paddock with its eyes pecked out by crows. But facing death was like looking into the sun. You had to turn away.
Beside her in the red dusk light, the children lay on the seat. Bodies and heads twisted at odd angles while they slept. She envied the suppleness, their ability to contort, seemingly without pain. The sun slipped behind the earth. The trunks of the bloodwood faded, the leaves were less vivid and the dirt became ordinary in shadow. She wondered sometimes, if she hadn’t married, perhaps her mother would have saved herself. Perhaps she would have gone to the doctor. If only she’d known she was ill. But her mother wasn’t the sort of person who talked about herself and it was only when Susannah rang and discovered her sleeping in the middle of the day that she began to worry. By then she was pregnant with the twins. By then it was too late. Before her mother’s last visit to hospital, Susannah drove to the farm on her own. She’d wanted to talk to her but when she got there she didn’t know what to say. The messy detail of her life had seemed so insignificant compared to what her mother was facing. Through the kitchen window the sun had fallen behind the land and Susannah had wondered how the sky would look when her mother was gone.
II
Susannah recognised the man at the veranda door. He touched the brim of his hat.
‘John around?’
‘I think he’s in the house.’
She left the man standing outside the kitchen. She couldn’t remember his name, even though she’d only met him the night before.
‘He won’t be long,’ she said on her return. ‘I’m glad I’ve seen you. I wanted to say thanks.’
He grinned shyly, revealing badly crooked teeth, eyes unable to meet hers. She’d known as soon as it happened, the steering wheel suddenly tugging hard to the left, that she had a flat tyre and that she’d have to change it, out there in the dark on the side of the road. There were five of them in the old Landcruiser, lights on full beam as they came up over the creek bank. The children had been still. Uncharacteristically quiet. Watching her, eyes startled by the spotlight. When the men got out of the Landcruiser the boys thought that one of them might have
Texas been their father. The men told her they were shifting camp, up to the station. Three of them stayed sitting on the back of the vehicle, talking in low voices, spitting, a match flaring, briefly illuminating the features beneath the hat.
‘Where you from?’ the driver had asked.
She told them.
‘John’s missus?’
There was a murmur and the others chuckled. They were stockmen from the neighbouring station. She didn’t get home until after eight.
Now the man turned away from the house to meet John as he came up the path beside the laundry. They both wore fawn-coloured hats that showed the dirt, with brims turned up on the side and flattened at the front. She couldn’t see their faces and anyway it was difficult to tell them apart with their checked sleeves rolled up to reveal capable forearms, brown boots beneath the long straight length of jeans, hands tucked into belts, and standing with their legs apart, leaning back, shifting their weight to the heels of their boots. The other man backed away and turned towards the yards. She could see he wasn’t happy about something her husband had said. She watched John cup his hand around a cigarette and light it. When he came through the kitchen door she was wiping the table. He took off his hat and placed it on the chair.
‘Ready for smoko?’ he asked.
‘There’s fresh bread and jam.’
‘No rib bones left?’
‘No.’
‘Where are the kids?’
‘Playing, I think, in their room.’
‘When did that fella say the truck was coming?’
‘End of the week.’
‘Yeah but what day?’
‘I don’t know. He just said end of the week.’
John squashed his cigarette into a saucer. ‘I want those bastards to get on with it.’
‘Who was that?’ she asked.
‘Mike, fella from next door. He reckons our mob have mustered some of his cattle. They’d be cleanskins if they were.’
‘So what’s he doing?’
‘He’s gone to have a look.’
They sat in silence drinking their tea. John buttered two slices of bread and layered the jam thickly. He held the whole concoction up to his mouth. Without looking at him she could see the jam oozing over the side of the bread, forming a drop which was about to fall. He swallowed noisily. She continued to look up at the top row of louvres, thinking how the sky was framed into bricks of blue.
‘You all right?’ he asked with his mouth full. He wiped the corners with the back of his hand.
‘Yeah fine.’
‘Boys been good?’
‘Yeah, pretty good.’ She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, turning them slightly so that she faced him.
She saw he was easily satisfied. He ate the rest of the bread and drained his tea. She took his plate and cup and put them
Texas in the sink and turned on the water. A little frog leapt from the sink to the windowsill, lightly brushing her hand with its cold skin.
‘You watching them when they’re outside? Don’t want that joe blake coming back,’ he said as he moved towards the door, putting on his hat.
‘Of course,’ she said without looking at him.
She washed up and dried the dishes. Paused, the dishcloth in her hand, hearing the drone of the lighting plant and the bored call of a crow, a corella shrieking for its mate, the sound of wings pushing through the air as they flew low over the garden and then silence and she imagined she could hear her own heartbeat.
John was returning. He poked his head in the door. ‘Forgot to tell you. I said to Mike we’ll give him a feed when he gets back.’
She looked at the clock on the wall. For some reason lunch was called dinner in the north. And then after that everyone knocked off for a couple of hours. It was something they all did, to escape the heat of the day. The face of the clock was like the one above the dining room table at the farm: black numbers on a white face. The clicks became louder, so much louder, eliminating all other sounds. Her mother used to say she thought too much about things. The lino pattern on the table moved, its red and yellow rectangles shimmering. What else was there to do but think? Her fingers felt the blood move through the vein in her throat, pulsing like time.
A child was crying. She returned the paperback to the bottom of the cupboard with the others. How long had it been?
Outside cicadas sizzled and the light was harsh. She reached the boys’ bedroom and found Ned leaning up against his bed with the stripy sheets. Clothes spilled out of the drawers into the middle of the room and in the corner were three cardboard boxes for the toys. They were empty and the toys were all over the floor. She moved carefully between a front-end loader and a ute and then over a farm animal. Her feet stepped on something that scraped the floor like big grains of sand. She looked down and then at Ned, catching his wet, frightened look. They had broken her necklace of seed pearls, a gift from her mother for her eighteenth birthday. Ned started to whimper.
‘What happened?’ she asked quietly.
‘Ollie did.’
‘Did what?’
She stared into her son’s glassy eyes. They were so clear they could have been fake. His lips were a shiny pink. Slightly open, they showed his small white milk teeth. She hated him.
‘Pulled it,’ he said and his mouth formed the words slowly.
His fist came up to his chin and he pulled down his hand.
She noticed the red mark around the skin of his neck and the cotton thread hanging over one shoulder.
‘Where’s Ollie?’
‘There.’
He pointed towards the door that led to the hallway. She could smell perfume. Further down was the main bedroom.
Texas Ollie was crouched beside the old dresser. To his left was the window that looked out onto the veranda. Light shone from under the frayed edges of red curtains and over some of the clothes from her wardrobe which had been pulled from their hangers and onto the floor like a lumpy bridal trail: her orange backless dress made out of cheesecloth, her striped cotton pantsuit with the lace around the collar and the sleeves. She stepped into the room and nearly slipped on something oily on the wooden floor. Nearby was a bottle of Opium. Ollie grinned at her. She stepped back, gripping the door carefully, and closed it on everything.
She used the leftover meat from a roast the night before last, cutting it up finely and mixing it with curry powder, fried onion, apple, Worcestershire sauce, marmalade and milk. The curry was cooked in half an hour and she served it with boiled rice and a salad made from lettuce, tomato, onion and tinned beetroot. She placed a pile of buttered bread on the table and poured the boiling water onto Bushells tea in the teapot and left it to brew by the stove. She heard the men’s footsteps before she saw them. They went around the outside of the kitchen to the laundry to wash their hands in the concrete tubs. She’d remembered to leave a towel for them. Boots thumped the floorboards as they took them off. John opened the door and rubbed the sweaty hair from his face, standing aside to let Mike in. Mike nodded in her direction but kept his head down as he placed his rollie stub on the edge of the table. The flywire door banged shut behind them. She put plates in front of them.
‘You’re not eating,’ said John.
She had no appetite. He filled his enamel mug with black tea. Static and muffled voices seem to seep from the rectangular box on the edge of the bench.
‘What’s that?’ asked John.
‘What? The radio?’
‘That,’ he said. ‘Is it the kids? Sounds like crying.’
‘Oh yes. I hear it now,’ she said. ‘Could be.’
‘Aren’t you going to check on them?’
‘I need to serve up.’
He looked across at Mike and then stood up, scraping his chair across the floor. She poured Mike his tea and asked if he wanted some milk. He nodded and she could sense he was uncomfortable being left alone with her.
John returned with the two boys: Ollie clutching his father around his neck and Ned holding firmly onto his hand, both with red wet faces and making small hiccuping sighs.
‘They must have closed the door on themselves. Made a bloody mess of our room. They won’t do that again.’
He sat them at the table and she could feel the children watching her but she concentrated on making their sandwiches.
Gradually they seemed to regain their shape, like grass that has been stepped on. When one of them knocked over the sauce bottle and the other put his fingers in the sugar, John asked if she could take them outside; he needed to speak to Mike.
Sitting on the veranda with the boys’ plates beside her, their sandwiches cut into small neat squares, she watched them run through the sprinkler, laughing and shrieking. She felt so far removed from them, as though they might have been someone
Texas else’s children. Her anger was gone and she was surprised that she didn’t feel anything. She was on the edge of it all. Sometimes she could hear the men’s voices, slow and low, but she wasn’t sure whether it was Mike or John. The door slammed and one of them was putting on his boots and footsteps moved the boards beneath her.
It was that time of the day when nothing much happened. No banging sounds from the work sheds or movement in the yards, but clothes still soaked in the tub, the soapy water turning brown. She lifted the wet clothes through the hand-held wringer attached to the concrete sink and water slopped down the front of her shirt and shorts, making tracks through the dust on her legs. She had her shower in the evenings now like her husband; even though she couldn’t see the dust blowing, it was there, in the air, attaching itself to everything.
III
Susannah was hanging the washing and the camp cook appeared on the other side of the shirt she was pegging on the line. She only knew him as Cookie, as did everyone else. She stepped out from behind the clothes, a cool wet leg of a pair of jeans brushing her shoulder. He told her that he’d come back to collect more stores, and since she had the key in her pocket, she left the washing where it was. He walked ahead of her, stepping lightly and quickly. She noticed because it was different from the way everyone else seemed to move, as if they were conserving energy, and it reminded her that it was weeks since she’d seen anyone except her husband, and occasionally Irish.
She thought briefly of Laura. She made a note of all the things he was packing into a box.
‘The young fella, Tommy, he’s always asking for beetroot.’
He reached for another tin. ‘You heard he come off his horse the other day? They reckon he was chasing a micky when a big old scrubber turned back on him. Jimmy threw his hat down to take his attention and Texas picked him up out of the dirt before that old bull knew what was going on. They reckon Tommy’s old man got a bit of money and sent him over from Queensland to straighten him out. Done something bad on speed or something. He’s not going home now. It’s in his blood.
Adrenalin they reckon’s the best drug of all.’
He was a small skinny man with a black singlet trimmed in red that was tucked into a belt with a large silver buckle. He looked up from the box he was packing. She noticed the outline of a bare-breasted woman drawn on his shoulder and a dagger running up the inside of his forearm.
She remembered the last time they spoke, when she’d asked him why he was here. She’d thought he wasn’t going to answer.
‘This tattoo on me chest,’ he said and looked down. It was just below his neck. ‘That’s the date I went into Pentridge and on me back is the day I left.’
When he walked out she saw the date above the neckline of his singlet. There was five years in between. This time she
Texas followed him out to the Toyota and watched him load the boxes onto the back.
‘So how much longer have you got out there?’ she asked.
‘Dunno. Depends how long the muster is. Whether they get all the cattle first time round.’
Susannah missed the routine in the evening when the men had been mustering the home paddocks. There was a different head stockman then. It was a couple of months ago. Cattle sounds would drift across the thick afternoon air and later the men would come up to the homestead for their nightly allocation of alcohol. She was supposed to open the cans so they didn’t stockpile their beer, but if John wasn’t around she didn’t bother. She remembered the night she discovered that some of the men had left. The trees and fences had darkened against the soft rosy glow of the horizon. She unlocked the cool-room door. As always their eyes were shielded by hat brims and they muttered their thanks, gathering in the cool air of the lawn. She noticed some men were missing.
‘Reggie’s shot through,’ said John at tea time.
‘Has he?’
‘Took Alex and Sam with him.’
‘How?’
‘Had his ute here. Parked out the back.’
She meant how was it that her husband had let it happen, but perhaps she should have asked why. But then she already knew the answer. He hadn’t listened to what the men had been trying to tell him. He didn’t know the country like they did. He had all the theories but none of the practical knowledge. Her eyes traced the familiar shape of his head and the tiny moon-shaped scar on his forehead. A chicken pox scar, she learnt not long after they met. She noticed the skin on his face had darkened even though he never went anywhere without a hat, and in places around his mouth, his eyes, there were lines. She realised they were both getting older.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What do you think?’ he said defensively. ‘I’ll find someone else.’
It would be difficult to find another head stockman in the middle of the season. She reached over for his plate and stacked it beneath hers and backed away from the table.
And then Laura arrived. It was about a week after the other men had left. Susannah had just put the children to bed when John’s vehicle returned from town. The headlights switched off with the engine and the sound of car doors closing seemed to echo afterwards like the ring of light she could see in her eyes after the bright beams had gone. There were men’s voices, low, husky Aboriginal murmurs and another that sounded like a woman’s voice. Susannah walked out on to the veranda. The insects were thick around the globe and she flicked them away from her face, distracted for a moment. They came closer, the man, her husband, and the woman who was perhaps no more than twenty, her skin like a child’s, smooth and shiny. John was looking at the girl and so was the tall stockman standing beside the vehicle. Susannah was suddenly aware of the differences between them. It was as though the woman had held up a
Texas mirror and in it Susannah could see her own reflection. It showed Susannah what she’d become and she hated it.
The fan whirled above them giddily as she made tea. Susannah pulled at the thread on the seam of her T-shirt, watching the stitches of the hem unravel. What should she be saying? She was furious, almost speechless with rage, unsure yet at whom to direct it. She tried to keep her head steady but the more she thought about it, the more it seemed she couldn’t control it. She could see what the men saw. A singlet stretched tight and a gold chain disappearing between the curves.
‘It took forever to get out here. The distances are amazing.’
Susannah blushed, realising Laura knew she was staring at her breasts. Laura stirred the sugar into her cup. Susannah noticed the leather bracelet around her wrist and her English accent. The door opened and John stepped back into the room.
‘The new head stockman’s called Texas,’ John said. ‘He’s worked out here before. The others are his relations, Gary and Jimmy.’ John nodded towards Laura. ‘I left your pack by the door to your quarters. My wife’ll show you where to go.’
What was she doing here? And John looking so pleased with himself. Susannah caught Laura’s glance and saw her eyes were soft like a young animal’s.
The dust stayed suspended above the track long after the cook’s vehicle left for the stock camp and Susannah remembered what he’d said about Laura. That Texas was looking after her.
It was such an absurd name: jillaroo.
IV
Ned pushed open the kitchen door with his tricycle and rode out onto the veranda. Ollie followed, whining that he was thirsty. They saw their father and the bore mechanic Gerry.
Ollie was pushing Ned’s bike around the veranda, faster and faster until it crashed into the kitchen wall. They giggled madly.
Susannah locked the cool room and pulled the boys inside. The light was bright in the kitchen, white and obvious. She poured two glasses of milk. Voices leaked through the half-shut louvres.
The sky lost its colour. She stood over the stove finishing off the mashed potato to have with their steak and thought of what she still needed to do for tea. The evening air reminded her of the farm; walking home towards the lights of the farmhouse, the mallee-root smoke spiralling into an orange sky, leaving her boots by the door and washing the grease from her hands.
During the years between school and journalism she sometimes worked for a shearing team contractor. She’d spend the day sweeping the woolshed floor, sorting the stain from the dags, picking up the fleeces and throwing them for the classer or threading the needle for the shearer to stitch a sheep that had had its skin split. Her father would have been drenching or treating flystrike or mending fences. She’d tell him where the team had been and what the sheep were like. They’d drink their beer and stretch out their legs and her mother would ask when they would like to eat. Susannah wondered if she’d asked and how was your day? Would her mother have said that she spent
Texas most of it in the kitchen and that it was suffocatingly tedious? But perhaps it wasn’t like that for her.
John came and went, taking the cool-room keys and returning them. She placed two bowls out on the bench for the children, spooning mashed potato and boiled vegetables into them. The meat from the frying pan was cut into small pieces and stirred with vegetable mixture and flavoured with tomato sauce. Ollie moved his spoon around in his food, using it like a shovel to make a hill and then a road.
‘Eat,’ she said as she always did.
Ned bit down on his spoon and refused to take it out of his mouth, nodding up and down as though the spoon was a beak. He thought he was funny, pecking Ollie’s shoulder. Ollie pushed Ned and he fell sideways, his elbow knocking the bowl off the table and onto the floor. She knelt carefully, spooning the food slowly into the bowl, and then picked up the child. She sat with him on her knee, jiggling him up and down until he stopped crying. But she let him remain there, snuggled in under her neck as she listened to the voices outside. John was talking. He was telling a story and fragments found their way into her kitchen. Except that she knew it wasn’t his story. John had never worked in the north until now and it sounded like a story he might have read from his collection of Australian stockman’s autobiographies. They always seemed to have been written by men who had either retired injured to their Sunshine Coast apartments or who were driving taxis in the city because they’d run out of other options. She imagined their wives being so tired of the yarns they lived, even after the view from their kitchen window had changed.
When her mother was dying she talked a little about her early married life. Her memories of seeing for the first time the little cottage she was to live in. She said there was nothing there, nothing surrounding it, only sand and then fence and paddock. Whilst her mother talked Susannah glanced up and out of the window to the gaily coloured flowerbeds and the oasis of a well-kept lawn and an exotic weeping willow. Her mother became animated by the memory and asked Susannah to find the photos. Susannah remembered staring hard into the black and white picture where everything seemed a different shade of grey. The square fibro cottage stood beside a tightly strung fence of ring-lock and barbed wire. Her mother had other stories. There was the heatwave of 1964 when Susannah, a one-month-old baby, had almost died of overheating and her mother had sponged her every hour until the heat broke with the crack of a summer storm. Lightning cut through the darkness and lit the farm in pieces, splitting the newly erected jam-tree fence posts, and then the rain came in fat warm drops.
Looking at Ollie on the other side of the table and with Ned squirming to get down from her knee, Susannah shivered, and thought of illness, of accidents, of being so far from anywhere.
It was also a fear of being unable to escape, a claustrophobic fear of being trapped in a story that was not of her making.
When she tucked the boys into their beds Ollie wrapped his arms around her neck, pulling her closer. Awkwardly, she
Texas pressed her cheek against his, bending over his bed. After a while she pulled back but his little grip held tight.
‘Tell me a story,’ he asked.
‘Let go,’ she murmured.
He released her and she sat down on the edge of his bed. The two little boys were like chrysalises, cocooned in their pale sheets. When she was a child she dreamed of dressing in her mother’s cast-off nightie because it was soft and fairy-like and when her pony, who was called Mischief, came to her window in the middle of the night she would climb on its smooth warm back, wearing her flyaway dress, armed with her bow and arrow, and they would follow the animal trails through the bush to the granite where they would live forever and hunt crows.
She returned to the kitchen as her husband was pouring rum into a glass and for some reason it irritated her. He noticed she was watching.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
She shrugged, leaning down towards the oven door to retrieve their meals, trying not to let it show that he annoyed her immeasurably. But just looking at him across the table after she’d placed their plates opposite each other was too much.
‘God I hate this place,’ she said furiously. Hating him.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘What’s wrong with me? Look at yourself. Who do you think you are? You grew up in the city. You don’t belong here. None of us do.’ She glanced down at her plate and then back at him. ‘How long do I have to put up with this?’
‘You’re not the person I married. You’ve changed. Since your mother died.’ His eyes were blinking rapidly, hurt.
‘My mother’s got nothing to do with it. Perhaps you were thinking you were marrying someone else.’
Before he could answer, she added: ‘Do you realise how boring it is?’
His eyes hardened. ‘You’re so bloody ungrateful. You don’t have to find two hundred steers out in this country. Get them to the meatworks. You’re not the one who has to answer to some boss in Perth.’
‘At least you get something for it,’ she muttered, her energy spent.
Her knife cut awkwardly through the meat that was tough and dry. The thick yellow fat was the only thing worth eating on the plate, fat flavoured by the animal’s diet of spinifex.
The cutlery scraped the plate. When she looked up she stared slightly to the left of her husband’s face at a spot on the wall where there had been a picture. She wondered what it might have been like. She could see it silver-framed, a scene of white sand, waves and, beyond, a glimpse of glistening turquoise water. Any sign of human activity seductively absent.
That evening he took off his clothes before his shower, unrolling the sleeves of his shirt, pulling the press-studs apart, and she wondered what it would be like to be married to someone else. The fan creaked above her bed and the tattered ends of the curtain wavered with a rush of air. He left his hat on top of the dressing table and his clothes on the floor as he walked naked across the hall to the shower.
Texas He turned off the light and sank into the mattress, causing her to roll into the middle. With his weight on her she felt as though she would slip through the springs. In the half-light she saw the curtain sigh, and through it she heard a dingo howl and the lonely bellow of a cow in trouble.
V
She was washing the kitchen louvres and thought of the dam, how the water must have covered some of the country Irish was talking about. She imagined what it would be like beneath the surface, how far down it would be dark, traces of trees, in black silt, a forest of ideas submerged. When her boys were men, where would they belong? Perhaps they wouldn’t need to feel as though they belonged anywhere in particular. She knew that not everyone was like her. It only became important when she was so far from home, so far from where she started. She thought of the farm where she grew up. It was different now that her brother was working alongside her father. One day he would inherit the property. Even now she could trace the topography of the land in her mind, remembering the yate-tree swamp and the small clumps of acacia, the banksia scrub surrounding a little knob of granite, and attached to all those places were memories of her and her family’s experiences. But she realised there was another way of knowing a piece of land, a slice of country, other than merely living there. It was learning what came before. Irish had many stories about the people he knew and the yarns they told. They were like the broken strands of a spider’s web floating in the bush after someone had unthinkingly walked through it. Once they would have connected. And it made Susannah think of her own fragments of memory, which included the young Aboriginal woman who came from the hostel in town to help her mother with the ironing. She didn’t stay long and Susannah recalled her mother telling her that the poor girl had been from the Kimberley. It was a long time ago, and Susannah was probably only about eight or nine, but she remembered that the young woman never spoke. Susannah had never thought of her again, until now.
She realised that the woman’s story might have been connected to all the other things she didn’t know about the country in which she grew up. There was always the excuse of not being told, but neither had she listened nor seen, nor asked questions.
Memories could lie submerged in the still depths of the dam without ever being disturbed.