Refuelled and rested overnight, Leaping Lena started on the arduous journey back to Darwin at daybreak. A plume of black smoke billowed upwards in the distance as she made her way north again.
Tom O’Hara stood in the doorway of the hotel. ‘Good morning!’
He interrupted Anna, who was lost gazing at the miniature worlds tucked away in their cabinet. She looked up at her boss.
‘I need you to go check on the whereabouts of the mail truck today. It was supposed to get in from Alice Springs yesterday. I believe there’s a passenger on board who was hoping to connect with the train. I guess whoever it is will be staying with us for the week.’
‘Of course!’ She wiped her dusty fingers on her apron. ‘Right away.’
Tom stepped aside as she hurried past.
‘There’s no rush, Anna. It’s Saturday. And they won’t be going anywhere now until the train gets back in next Friday.’
The mail truck usually arrived towards the end of each month, after an arduous cross-country trek all the way from Alice Springs. It delivered tons of canvas bags filled with His Majesty’s Mail to remote outposts along the way. This would be its last run for the year, before the start of the wet season made the terrain impassable. Anna always felt a hint of excitement whenever she heard the truck’s wheels crunch over the pebbly drive, even though she knew none of the letters or parcels would ever be for her.
She had already finished her first chore for the day – gathering eggs from the hens. She set the chooks free to scavenge for grubs. Groups of apostlebirds would dart among swarms of flies that buzzed around the rubbish heap, their rapid-fire squawking mingling with the chickens’ shrieking, all bickering over scraps. She loved the way they bathed ecstatically in the dust, covering their grey bodies with dirt. Kites hovered overhead, singing vibrato as they waited for the misstep of some unlucky lizard or mouse, before swooping in for the kill.
Every day she waited for night to fall just so she could go back home in her dreams, but at dawn Anna always woke to eucalypts tapping insistently on the corrugated-iron roof. She opened her eyes to harsh sunlight flickering between the branches. There was no need for an alarm clock here, the birdsong doing a fine job of bringing her right back to Birdum. The birds were a strange chorus – nothing like the sounds she was used to growing up in Europe.
Routine kept her from feeling lonely – emptying the commode, washing her face in a basin of water, combing her hair and knotting it into a bun. She chose a dress to wear, one of three she owned, and tied a clean apron around her waist. Finally she slipped on her shoes, carefully polished the night before to wipe off the perpetual dust. She could hardly believe the woman she saw in the mirror – blonde lashes, tanned forearms and naked lips.
Gubbins was stretched out on the veranda, snapping at blowflies. As soon as he saw Anna, his tail started to thump furiously on the wooden planks. He was an unusual dog; sandy-coloured, with a large head and narrow shoulders. Whip smart, he could slide into the narrowest of spaces, wiggling his body out from the gap under the door of the beer cellar where he slept, a veritable canine Houdini. The Yangman women told her he was part dingo, which would explain why he howled pitifully into the darkness every evening, joining the night chorus of his faraway kin in the wild.
The build-up to the wet season had started early, the humidity already stifling by late morning. There were only ever two seasons here – wet and dry. Some of the men lounged outside under a wooden awning, scratching their groins and slapping at mosquitoes, talking about how early it seemed the rains would be arriving. Those known as barflies paced up and down, waiting for the pub to open. Beer o’clock began at noon and ended at closing. Punters would line up in front of Anna, who stood behind the counter – a priestess dispensing the holy sacrament of cold ale. The Birdum Hotel was the watering hole for locals, as well as those who were just passing through. Most of the regulars worked on the surrounding cattle stations, huge tracts of cleared land at Elsey and Newcastle Waters. They hid the harshness of their lives behind a veil of smoke and alcohol. It was an easy camaraderie, which every so often blew up into fisticuffs when a few too many beers had been downed. Tempers could flare in the sweltering humidity yet conversation was slow, silence more often than not taking the place of words.
With each year that passed, Anna found herself needing less and less. How hurriedly she had packed her leather suitcase when she left Europe, filling it with what she once thought essential. Out here it all seemed quite ludicrous – the heels, the silk blouse, the tapered woollen skirt. She had bundled up her belongings and left hurriedly. Now, the folded cardigan and stockings were tucked away in a neat pile on the shelf.
She moved about like a ghost, although she felt more spy than spectre, observing the customers as they sat at the counter waiting to be served. Silently, she watched mouths open and close, clam lips swallowing unintelligible words. And when the hotel’s patrons got drunk, it sounded as though their tongues were falling out of their mouths when they spoke. Their craggy faces displayed a vastly different landscape from the European intensity she understood so well. Even a yawn was strange here – gaping and luxurious, instead of furtive and doomed to wither. These men embraced each gesture – their coughing, wind, laughter – unashamed of the orchestra of their bodies. And at dinner they took their time, chewing each morsel slowly, like actors in a play whose only role was to eat, swallow and belch. You could be fooled into thinking they were calm but, standing off to one side, Anna saw their uneasy fidgeting.
Fergus McTavish, the town’s blacksmith, dressed in a pair of paint-spattered trousers, sat on the veranda leafing through the Northern Standard.
‘G’day, love,’ he mumbled, as Anna walked past.
Last wet season he had fallen into the river under the railroad bridge. He would have met his demise had it not been for one of the Yangman men hearing him mewl like a drowning kitten and pulling him out just in time.
Although it was a limpid morning, Anna’s head felt shrouded in fog. Papa would have told her to ‘take a walk to clear it’, but that was impossible in Birdum – there was nowhere to go. A rusted Castrol sign hung above the lone petrol pump that stood out the front of the hotel. A row of shacks lined the road, their windows decorated with faded curtains. She kicked at stones as she headed over to the town’s water tank. Pat Dougan lay sprawled under his old truck, the pockmarked soles of his shoes peeking out. Gubbins mooched over and stood sentry beside him, scratching at fleas. Pat was a solid man. He wriggled from side to side and, as he bent one knee up, Anna caught a glimpse of his crotch. She tried to avoid imagining the bulge of stinking flesh tucked away there, but just at that moment he clamped his legs tightly together and loudly broke wind.
The town water tank at the entrance to Birdum had the best view in miles. It stored enough water to quench the thirst not only of Leaping Lena and her passengers, but of everyone who passed through the town. Anna began to climb to the top of the tank’s rickety ladder to see if there was any sign of the mail truck. Reaching the top, she stopped for a moment to read a plaque she had never noticed before, embossed on one side:
WANDERSON & SONS
MAKERS
RICHMOND, VICTORIA
Such irony. A family with such a peripatetic name, probably ensconced in some comfortable city mansion while their workmanship braved the very centre of the outback. She looked down at the sea of lancewood scrub and spinifex grass encircling the town. Up close, scraggly trees with grey stringy bark haunted the fringes of Birdum. Others might feel the vastness of this flat vista strangling them like a noose, but Anna had grown to respect this landscape and relished the sense of freedom it offered. The wind whispered its secrets in her ear. She had arrived on a kind of reverse pilgrimage, not a striving towards anything but, rather, a hope of disappearing. To vanish, simply slip away from the rest of the world – that’s what you could do here in Birdum.
She had been a quiet child. A girl who noticed the small things. Back then, she could never have foreseen that fate would take her to the other side of the world. As soon as she had set foot onboard the SS Wuppertal, she had been determined to submerge her past in the ocean’s depths somewhere along the way. Crossing the equator, she had thrown her fur-lined winter boots overboard.
The bush held an abundance – the possibility of space, safety and promise. Kangaroos slept through the afternoon, under the shade of pale bushes. The light brought hope of change as the day moved from pinkish dawn to azure, jewel-studded evening. Night was alive with moving shadows singing mournful songs, an orchestra of strange voices, peppered with silence. Anna felt no fear. This unhurried presence, so distant from the rest of the world, brought her a sense of calm.
The horizon drew a circle around her. From the top of the tank, she had an unfettered view. To the north she could see a miniature city of giant ant hills standing tall. The mounds stretched as far as the eye could see, like an army of clay soldiers. To the east, the sky was bright, the land dotted with distant shimmering lakes, chimeras rising along the horizon. The dried-up riverbed was nothing more than a scar seeping into the red earth, lined with drooping scabrous trees that had given up all hope. In the distance, smoke from a small campfire prodded the sky. She looked down onto the small town below, people going about their business without noticing her. Some of the men were hauling steel railings towards the station shed. Pat had strolled over to a bush and was unbuttoning his fly. From up there she could hear the loud tinkling echo as he relieved himself.
She stood waiting atop the tank. This land, alternating between desiccating heat and flash floods, demanded ferocious respect. Any notion Anna might have held of it being exotic was replaced by the reality of a harsh terrain, unforgiving to any stranger who wandered off the main path. From up there, the hotel roof looked like a giant Pinocchio hat that someone had accidentally dropped from the sky. The building was arranged in a square, a tableau held together by dirt and dust. A windmill raised water from somewhere deep underground. Lone, bleached skeletons of strange animals lay strewn about, once connected by sinew and flesh. The calligraphy of their tracks was etched into the sand. Splayed out, this genealogy of bones looked ready to spring to life with each setting of the sun, rising again in some ghostly articulation of their former selves.
It had taken crossing huge oceans and vast tracts of land to purge herself of all she’d left behind, but Anna felt safe here, protected by the boundary of sky. It was a wrung-out shade of blue, faded by the harsh sun. There hadn’t been a drop of rain for 150 days. Even the insects were too tired to hum this morning. As she gazed out, the mail truck finally appeared in the south, at first a mere crinkle in the horizon, surrounded by a halo of dust. A small part of her wanted to leap off the water tank and hurl herself into the air like a bird. She stood frozen to the spot, staring out at the vista before her.
Anna drifted back to childhood, to a secret hiding place in an old pine. From her vantage point on a low-hanging branch, she watched doves bathing in a crumbling stone fountain. A lone stork passed overhead. Bees buzzed around a group of little wooden boxes below, ferrying pollen from tall yellow flowers with leaves the size of ears. A black weathervane stood motionless, glistening on the roof of a grand old house. As a child she often used to daydream about how her life might unfold. Would she be like Cinderella, destined to meet a rescuing prince, or become one of the ugly sisters desperate enough to cut off her toes to marry? She preferred tales with happy endings over unspeakable deeds that crept stealthily into her dreams, littering them with giants, wolves and sneezing goats doomed for slaughter.
A voice called up to her, interrupting her reverie.
‘Allo! Allo!’
She looked down. The mail truck was now parked below. A stranger stood beside it, staring up at her, his hand raised in a kind of salute to shield his eyes from the glare. His reddened face looked shocked by the sun.
‘Allo! Lady! Must be nice view from there. This is what you do for fun around here?’
Even from up on the water tank, Anna could see his eyes flash blue. He wore a bow tie, sola topi hat and leather ankle boots. His high-waisted breeches were fastened with suspenders, a Box Brownie slung over his shoulder.
‘I come join you,’ he called, his voice reaching up, as if trying to hold her in a thin web woven from his breath.
He had a thick accent that sounded like some strange birdsong. She couldn’t place it – Russian, Polish perhaps? He hung his hat on a solitary termite mound. Before she knew it, he had climbed up and was standing beside her.
‘What are you doing up here?’ he asked.
‘It’s my job,’ she answered. ‘I am from the Birdum Hotel, and we were waiting for you to arrive.’
‘Natürlich.’ Clearly recognising her accent, he switched to speaking German. ‘Well, as you can see, I am here now. And only a day late.’ The stranger removed his hat and bowed, then held out his hand. ‘Alter Mayseh, at your service.’
‘I believe you are headed onwards to Darwin?’ she asked.
‘Yes. That is correct.’
‘Well, you’ve missed the train.’ Anna started climbing back down the ladder without introducing herself. ‘It left early this morning and won’t be back for another week now.’
‘So glad to encounter such a warm welcome.’
She bobbed her head back up, glaring at him for a moment. ‘I am accustomed to greeting guests on ground level. I don’t expect them to climb up here.’
‘Of course. My apologies.’ He stepped back from the edge and turned to follow her down.
Back on solid ground Anna extended her hand to the stranger. ‘Anna Winter.’
He stared at her. ‘What beautiful eyes you have – forest meets sky.’ Alter Mayseh pulled out his camera. ‘Come! Let us have a photo. It is fitting to commemorate this moment of our arrival after crossing the desert on this rusty steed.’ He gathered his travel companions together – the stocky driver and a lanky Aboriginal youth – in front of the mail truck, and handed the camera to Anna. ‘Would you mind?’
She stared through the viewfinder at the three disparate figures who stood stiffly beside each other, like puppets on a toy stage. She snapped the image that would capture the moment she met this curious man – a fractured piece of the whole.