I woke up thirsty, already drenched in sweat. I groaned aloud. It was a desperate, pathetic sound and I hated it. I struggled to sit up, propping myself on my elbows, looking around the dark room, trying to remember what had happened after returning to the pub. I gave up as my head started pounding, my hangover kicking in. When everything’s homemade, everything’s stronger, both your pleasures and your poisons.
‘Ah, you’re awake,’ Tobe said.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by his voice, but I was.
‘This should help.’
He threw the curtains open. I groaned a third time, dazed by the bright light. Blinking it away, I realised that I was home. How? I turned to look at Tobe, but he was already walking out the door. I sat up, waved away the first flies of a brand new day, wished my head would stop hurting, wondered where my glasses had gone. The low moan of the wind joined the sweet birdsong echoing from the bush and the occasional scrape of the rusted windmill in an otherworldly symphony.
The quiet broke as Tobe started banging around in the kitchen. ‘Here, this’ll fix you right up,’ he said when he re-entered the room.
I sat up. He passed me a chipped cup of black billy tea, rolled me some bush tobacco, passed that over too.
‘Thanks,’ I croaked.
‘No worries.’
He smiled at me. He was clear-eyed, the bastard. He flopped down on the edge of the bed; I sipped at my tea, guzzled more water, slowly started feeling better. Before the first cup of tea was done, Tobe offered to make another. I nodded gratefully. He disappeared into the kitchen, came back with two fresh cups and the bottle of whiskey. Red and Blue trotted along beside him, their tails wagging. He shooed them away; the slam of the flyscreen door echoed behind them as they bolted outside.
‘Fancy a bit of a pick-me-up?’
Tobe poured a shot into his cup. He looked at me, hard eyed, daring me to say no. He smirked, kissing the rim of my cup with the neck of the bottle.
‘No bloody way.’
He shrugged. ‘Girl.’
I decided to chance having a smoke and lit the bush tobacco Tobe had rolled for me. My stomach heaved and I hacked up my guts. Tobe smirked again, plucking the rollie from my fingers.
‘Shit, I forgot—I’ve got something that might cheer you up.’
I tried not to act surprised. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn wooden box about six inches by three.
‘Here you go.’
He passed it over. Inside was a clean square of cloth. I eased it out, opened it up. My hands shook; I almost dropped a brand new pair of glasses.
No way …
They seemed untouched; I couldn’t even guess how old they must have been. I slipped them on. A little fuzzy in spots, not perfect, but nothing is. However, the world was suddenly much clearer than it had been from behind the cracked, good-for-nothing pair I had been wearing.
‘Cheers, mate.’ I knew better than to ask where they came from.
‘No worries,’ he said, a genuinely happy smile creasing his face.
I lay back down, still not really awake, and marvelled at the fact that at last I could once again count the cracks in the ceiling. Tobe pulled something else from his pocket and started rolling a breakfast joint, whistling tunelessly under his breath. I yawned. My hangover went from being indescribably painful to just ordinarily painful. Eventually, Tobe lit the joint, took a drag, waved it my way. I blanched, my stomach a churning ocean. He muttered something under his breath, something I guessed to be a crude insult on my manhood.
‘Dickhead,’ I replied.
He laughed.
‘So, anyway—how’d the rest of last night go?’ I asked.
I don’t know why I asked, beyond the gruesome fascination with accidents and disasters we all share. Maybe it was the slightly crazed shine in Tobe’s eyes; he looked like he had been hitting it hard and hadn’t managed to stop, like he needed to get something out but didn’t know how.
‘It didn’t rain, everyone cracked it, the mood got ugly …’
‘Yeah, yeah, come on, give me some credit, I made it that far.’
‘As I was saying—the mood got ugly, there were a couple of fights, you threw up on your boots, I had to dink you home. You know, the usual.’
Tobe started laughing, which soon became a cough deep in his chest. He hacked into his fist, rubbing at the tears streaming from his bloodshot eyes. Once he had gotten himself under control, he offered me the joint again.
I ignored it and his laughter. ‘So what about those lights? What were they all about?’
Tobe’s laughter stopped dead. ‘Don’t know, mate.’
There was something in his voice, a catch or stumble. I looked at him, unable to tell whether he was messing with me or not.
‘That’s a shame about the rain,’ I muttered.
No reply.
An awkward silence hung between us. Tobe didn’t move, didn’t say anything. A little weirded out, I gave up, hauling myself out of bed. Tobe sat there, his face glazed. I left him to his stoned reverie, slowly got dressed. From nowhere, my head started swimming and I staggered a little.
‘Easy, easy,’ Tobe said, getting to his feet, offering me his arm like someone does a cripple or a senior citizen.
I clutched at him, nearly pulling him off his feet.
‘Come on, Bill, get it together.’
I couldn’t do it, and Tobe lowered me back onto the bed. His face unreadable, he just looked down at me. This went on for a moment too long—I reluctantly got back to my feet, Tobe’s stare drilling into me.
And then he shook his head. ‘Sorry, got lost for a sec,’ he said, smiling a smart-arse smile.
I let it slide. ‘Right, what’s the plan?’ I asked, more out of a desire to speed up his departure than because I was dying to know. I had another long day ahead of me and knew that nothing would get done in a hurry.
‘I reckon I’m off down to the pub. I want to check out the damage, maybe even start making some plans, if last night I did what I think I did … Hey, you know what? If I did take over, that’d make me your new publican.’
I whistled low as it all came back to me. ‘Nice one, dickhead.’
He ignored my slight. ‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘What are you up to?’
I pretended to think about it, scratching my head. ‘Chores and jobs and stuff.’
‘Different day.’
‘Same bullshit.’
We laughed together, unrepentant lovers of an old joke.
‘Right, then,’ I said. ‘Lead on, MacDuff.’
Tobe rolled his eyes but didn’t correct me. I followed him through the dark house, every curtain drawn to keep the heat at bay. We walked down the old hallway and past the dusty rooms, making our way more by memory than by sight, winding through what had once been my parents’ house, my grandparents’ house, my great-grandparents’ house. We walked outside, into the hot, dry air. Flies swarmed us and we did the salute. Fresh sweat was already bleeding through my coveralls. I held my canteen out. Tobe declined.
‘Red! Blue! Come on, stop fucking about!’ he yelled, calling his dogs to him.
They appeared in the distance, ran to us, collapsed at Tobe’s feet. He smiled at them, gave them a pat and a scratch, and then he straddled his bike. Red and Blue both groaned. They looked at him with sad, wet eyes, but they got to their feet nonetheless.
‘Take it easy, all right?’
‘You too, mate, you too. We’ll have some games soon, all right?’
‘No worries.’
He dinged his bell a cheery goodbye, Red and Blue hurrying after him. I waved until he was nothing but a speck in the distance.
The house loomed behind me. In front of me, the dirt road leading into town—the road that Tobe had taken—was a distant, dusty sliver. I stared at nothing, those flashing lights in the sky playing in my mind’s eye.
It quickly grew too hot to stand there in the sun.
I made a quick stop by the withered desert lime, watered it with my own secret ingredient and then headed back inside. My feet followed a familiar path to the kitchen; too thirsty to fumble around for a cup, I drank straight from the tap. It shuddered, shook violently, started spitting out water. As usual, the water was lukewarm and cloudy.
I tried not to think about how low the tanks must be.
My thirst temporarily sated, I wandered off to the bathroom. I stripped, filled a rough tin bucket a few inches deep, sacrificed enough water to wash my beard and my crotch, my armpits and my feet. I caught the grey scum in another bucket. The reflection in the cracked mirror looked older than my forty-something years should, all faded bushranger beard and greasy grey hair, deep-set wrinkles, and sunburn that wouldn’t fade. Naked, still a little wet, I returned to the kitchen and raided the cupboards. I breakfasted, standing up, on a few slices of dried roo, a couple of shrivelled desert limes, a handful of sun-scorched berries. When I had emptied my plate, I tried to ignore the fact that I was still a bit hungry.
We were all a little bit hungry all the time. We just got used to it.
I rolled up some bush tobacco. I found my tinderbox, struck a tiny fire, lit up. The smoke was harsh. I drip-dried in the sunlight pouring through the kitchen window, my eyes shut; I couldn’t tell the difference between the dirty water from my bucket-bath and the fresh sweat that had started running. The heat weighed on me, made it hard to breathe. I gave up on my smoke, took myself back inside, changed into some work clothes—heavy boots and coveralls. My hat was in its usual place—hanging on a rusty nail that had been hammered into the wall long before I had been born.
Everything I wore was a hand-me-down or had been cobbled together.
I stomped outside and got to it, clearing scrub from around the house, checking on the nearest traps. They were empty, as usual. I topped up my canteen, rolled up some more bush tobacco, took a break, had a smoke under the veranda out the front of the house. In front of me was an empty paddock of stunted and bleached-yellow grass; it sloped down gently, after a while meeting the road into town. I knew that down there, standing by the driveway gate, the house was almost hidden by the dying grass, the dense scrub and a straggly thicket of yellowbox that somehow still hung on.
The only things that broke the emptiness of the paddocks were a few reefs of rock reaching out of the parched earth and a barren watercourse cutting a dirt scar across the monotony. The whole place looked derelict; you would think that no one but a fool could call it home. I whispered thanks to my parents and grandparents, to their parents and grandparents, to everyone who helped make it happen. Out the back of the house—its rambling bulk concealing them from prying eyes—the hill rolled down into a shallow valley, ending at my shrivelled fruit trees and my ragged veggie patch.
Beyond them, nestled in the shade of a towering gum, grew a single rose that got watered every day no matter what.
I set off across the paddock, checked the traps strung out on the land, poked in the few rabbit holes left, rapped on the roughly hewn possum boxes clinging to the dead and dying trees, checked for felled roos caught in bear traps wrought from broken pieces of farm machinery. Nothing. I made the hike to the nearest dam, heaved on an oversized roller knocked together from the axle of a broken-down tractor, wound back the dam’s reflective cover. It was one of Tobe’s ideas: an enormous sheet of some kind of plastic that must have been worth a fortune to someone, stopping any water from evaporating during the long, hot days.
If it did rain you had to be out there like shit off a shovel, dragging it back.
Barely staining the dam bed was a brackish puddle. I scooped out a bucket of dreck, wound the cover back, carried the dreck back to the house, sat it under the veranda. I once again set off across the paddock. This time, I stopped at each solar still—deep holes sealed off with ratty tarpaulins—and climbed down to retrieve any dew that had settled during the night. I carted each load back to the house and left it under the veranda before setting off for the next. By the time I was done, the sun had moved across the house, no longer threatening the veggie patch and the fruit trees. They were begging for a drink, and I decided to dig more stills another day. I carefully rolled back the tattered shade-cloth that protected them. I emptied all the water I had collected. It didn’t even settle the dust. I doled out grey-water from the house; it was next to useless. I hurried inside, filled a bucket with water from the tank, hurried back out, gave everything another splash. I made sure the rose got a good soaking; a flower had bloomed, brilliant and tiny against the dark bush.
I picked the flower and walked to the graveyard and lay it where I had buried her.
I got back into it, weeded the patch, plucked a few undiscovered pieces of shrivelled fruit, checked on some figs that were drying in the sun, picked a few shrivelled berries I had overlooked, picked a prickly-pear, cut a few paddles off a top-heavy cactus that wobbled and tottered and threatened to fall. Done, I looked over the land, thinking the same thing I always did when standing in that spot: it almost looked beautiful.
I set off for the house, found a brown snake sleeping on a rock, cut its head off with a shovel, left the shovel standing in the ground as a marker of sorts.
Never pass up a free lunch.
The spluttering engine of Sheldon’s charcoal-powered truck took an age to reach me. Sacked out under the veranda, skinning the cactus paddles I had picked, being ever-so-careful not to prick myself on the spines, I dismissed the noise as merely the buzzing of a particularly loud fly. I didn’t see the truck until I set aside the oozing cactus flesh and glanced at the dirt road for no other reason than because it was there.
‘You what?’
The truck edged through the gates. I shook my head, confused. The truck turned onto the driveway, struggled to climb the modest hill. I reluctantly hurried away to the barn that housed the water tanks, hating that shadowy room of bad memories. The truck drew closer. The bark of the engine stalling carried on the wind. Sheldon swore, loud enough for me to hear. There was a moment of silence before the engine started back up with a throaty cough—the truck veered off the driveway, cutting a path across the paddock, heavy tyres crushing the dying grass.
‘Morning, Sheldon,’ I yelled as the truck crunched over the gravel apron of the barn.
He nodded at me over the noise of the engine. A solar-powered fan bolted onto the rear-view mirror stirred the air in the cabin, tugging at Sheldon’s wispy hair. A homemade fly-strip hung next to it. Junk cluttered the dashboard: pairs of broken sunglasses, faded maps, a beaten metal hipflask, animal bones, bits of dead wood.
‘How’s your hangover?’ I yelled.
‘Not bad, I didn’t drink that much. I’m too old to keep up with you young folk. How about you?’
‘I’m feeling it today.’
The idling engine droned on. Sheldon said nothing more. I looked up at him.
‘Mate, um, sorry to ask, but what are you doing here?’
His weather-beaten face was expressionless. ‘You don’t remember?’
I didn’t answer, didn’t need to.
‘Last night, you said you were running low and that you could do with a hand. So here I am.’
And so I discovered another hole in my memory. I smiled pathetically, trying to hide my embarrassment. ‘Did I mention how I was going to fix you up?’
Sheldon laughed. ‘Yeah. I’ve got some work that needs doing back home, including a new bore to dig. You said you’d help out.’
He laughed again. Shit. The sun was already dipping, a shimmer on the horizon. The day had been hard enough; I didn’t fancy working through the night as well.
‘It’s all right,’ Sheldon said as my shoulders slumped. ‘It’s been waiting a while, a bit longer can’t hurt.’
‘Cheers.’
Shamefaced, I turned away. I unlocked the barn’s tall wooden doors, waved him inside. He took it slowly, swinging the truck around and backing in. As always, I wondered about the almost illegible letters on the side of the truck that spelled out CFA, but didn’t bother to ask Sheldon what they meant. Instead, I followed the truck inside.
The engine died with a shudder. Silence fell. I did my best to ignore the ghosts that called the barn home.
Sheldon jumped down from the cabin, manhandled a firehose from its nook, connected it to my tank, and refused my offer of help. He started the pump, pulling hard on the whipcord; his old body was still strong.
Blessed water started to flow from the truck.
Sheldon let the pump do its thing and I followed him as he walked outside. He squatted on his haunches in a thin sliver of shade thrown by the barn; I squatted next to him, waiting for him to say something. His back against the wall, his feet scuffing the gravel apron, he just took a tobacco pouch from his pocket and adjusted his battered hat. He rolled some bush tobacco, took out a tinderbox, started a tiny fire, lit up. He stared into the distance, looking like he had always been there, like he had grown out of the dirt. When it became apparent that he was quite happy to sit there in silence, I offered him a drink. As always, he shook his head no, offering me some from his canteen instead. This time, I shook my head no.
It was a well-rehearsed routine.
‘Tobe reckons it’s been raining somewhere out west, not too far from here,’ I said, attempting to break the silence.
‘Yeah, I heard the same.’
That was all he said. I tried again to make conversation.
‘What do you reckon those lights were?’
‘Don’t know.’
The pump groaned, choked, and then went back to beating monotonously. Flies buzzed, birds sang, the wind blew. You could almost hear the slow creak of the world turning. Neither of us spoke. The tiny fire at Sheldon’s feet crackled almost inaudibly. At some point, the pump stopped. For a moment, Sheldon and I just basked in the quiet. But then he put his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. We walked back into the barn; he once again refused my offer of help, shut off the pump, pulled the pipe from the tank, bundled it away. He pulled himself into the truck, settling in the cabin. For a moment, he sat there looking through the open barn doors.
‘I grew up here, Bill. I’ve been here forever, always worked the family farm. It used to be beautiful, full of life. Now, there are only a few of us left. And with the pub on its way out … Shit, what’s a town without a pub?’
His voice was shaking, soft. He looked like he wanted to cry but didn’t know how. It was the longest speech I had ever heard him give; he never said much, a different kind of classic.
He caught me staring. ‘I’m all right,’ he said. He didn’t want or need my pity. ‘Anyway, maybe she’ll kick on. Maybe Tobe’ll work his magic. You never know …’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
His face closed up shop, folding in on itself. ‘Look, just forget it,’ he said, starting the truck, all business again. ‘I’ll let you know when I need a hand.’
‘Catch you later, then.’
‘You bet.’ I waved him off.
A little disheartened, I watched Sheldon’s truck become nothing more than a dirty red blur in the distance. It turned a corner, disappearing behind a line of ironbox trees. The toot-toot-toot of the horn was all that was left, the tiniest echo on the wind. I locked the barn, glad to be done with the place, wishing I would never have to enter it again.
I tramped back to the house, the dying grass snapping beneath my feet like so much broken glass.
I hung my hat back on that old rusty nail, and headed straight for the bathroom. I ran the tap into the bath, stuck my head under the stream. The fresh water in the tank would hold out, as long as I didn’t make a habit of it. I smiled, stupid and wide, washing dust from the scratchy fuzz of my hair, rinsing grit from the bird nest of my beard. The water finally ran clear. I cupped it in my hands and drank.
I ignored the cramp in my stomach and drank some more.
Out the window, I saw the golden glow of twilight. I left the bathroom, stopped at the spare room that served as a library, the walls lined with shelves of books, magazines, photo albums. I stared at them for a long time, ended up choosing a book at random. I went out to the front veranda to enjoy the setting sun. It was beautiful, caressing me softly rather than cooking me in my skin. A cool breeze blew in from the south, bringing blessed relief.
I listened to its lies. I let it tell me that everything would be okay.
As always, I scratched a black line on the wall of the veranda, marking another day without rain. Grouped in blocks of five, the black lines filled the wall. I gave up counting the most recent row when I hit one hundred or so. I laughed, without a hint of humour, trying not to worry about it.
What else could I do?
I turned away from the horror story it told. I stretched and yawned. To be honest, the day had done me in. I slouched on the battered old couch under the veranda, kicked off my boots, rolled some bush tobacco and lit up. The bleached-yellow grass of the paddocks and the mottled greens of the bush slowly softened in the light of the setting sun.
I looked out at it, truly happy.