I didn’t know exactly that I was leaving, but I knew I wasn’t coming back. I rode out on Muddy Gates Lane, slumped in the saddle, too hungry to think. A crowd of emus fanned into the plain from the shade of gum trees, their heads and feathered tails bobbing, a wisp of pink where a piece of sky was broken.
In Maude, the local dogs were up and barking but the townies were sleeping in their beds. I knocked at the doors and windows of Cova Cottage, hoping the Appletons might wake and give me food, but there was no sign of life in there. I helped myself to plums the magpies hadn’t fed on in their yard.
A few miles out on the Damascus Road, twenty miles south of where I’d come from, a cattle drover was making breakfast with a tin billy by a fire. His border collies skulked around the edges of a hundred head of sheep as they grazed beside the road. I tried to pass unnoticed, to get further away, but the stock horse whinnied when he saw me.
“Wanna cuppa?” The drover waved me over.
I tied my pony up beside his horse, but not so close that they might kick. I ate the jam and damper like I’d not seen food all year, poured from the billy into a can that carried meat. The hot tea in my throat felt like honey.
“How’s ya lovely mother?” the drover said. I didn’t expect he’d know me. “I seen ya walkin’ with her down the town.”
“She’s poorly,” I said.
Before there were more questions, I got up and went. By the time I hit Deniliquin it was already afternoon and I was feeling halfway better, the pains of hunger passing, but it was thirty miles further and the pony was footsore. I got off and laid my hands around his hooves, felt the heat in them; his soles were bruised by stones.
There was a blacksmith on the edge of town working at his forge. The smell of freshly burnt hoof as he put a too-small shoe on a draught horse and rasped the foot to fit it. I knew the shoe should fit the hoof, not the hoof the shoe, but I didn’t mention it.
“I don’t have any money except my pony needs to be shod,” I said, deepening my voice like I was older.
“Won’t do shoes for nothing,” the man said, Irish.
I watched and waited. It looked bad to lead a limping pony through the streets. When the farrier finished the heavy horse, clipping the ends of its clenches, he stood up slowly, his hand in the small of his back. He took a good look at my bush pony.
“I’ll give you fifty quid for him,” he said, “shoe him for myself.”
It was a lot of money for after the War. The pony was a good one but I had to get to where it was green like Europe.
“How much for the saddle?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said.
I undid the girth and put the poley saddle over my arm, took the dirty notes from the Irisher’s blackened hands and counted them. I’d never seen so much money.
Four pounds three shillings bought a sit-up-all-night ticket on the Riverina, overnight to Melbourne. It left me with two twenties and a fiver, a bunch of shillings clinking in my fingers, and a saddle on my arm.
I hadn’t travelled on my own before. The train shunted and squealed and let off steam. I slept with my hand around the rolled-up money, dreamt of my father rustling and snapping at kindling, tearing and balling up pages of old telephone books as he stoked the boiler with a blackened poker, his hands ingrained with the sand that lay in the furrow of his brow, settled in the spit on his teeth.
I woke up sweating, my reflection in the black train window, nothing outside but night. I looked grubby compared with people propped up in their seats around me. I borrowed a towel from the top of a sleeping lady’s bag, took it to the bathroom where there was soap wrapped up in glossy paper. I shut the lid of the lavatory because it smelt and the rattle of the tracks was loud up through it. I wet my hair and washed it in the basin. I rubbed the suds over my body and cleaned out my dusty mouth. I washed my clothes in the water I poured for my hair, pushing at them in the basin until the water was sandy brown. I didn’t have underpants but I still had my mother’s Christmas socks.
I rolled my wrung-out clothes in the train lady’s towel, plopped them on the lavatory lid, and stamped them dry. Standing naked in the cold, I slid the window open and watched the trees go by. I’d never seen a forest. I held the towel, my shirt, and pants out the window, let them dry in the train wind, careful not to lose them to the night. A man kept knocking at the door but I didn’t let him in.
A lurching stop without a station, the sound of train men yelling and the carriage standing still. Sheaths of daylight came in through the window. A racehorse farm with creosote yards of thoroughbreds in clover, the grass a green I’d never seen.
I took my saddle and moved along the aisle through the cabins, my clothes still damp against my skin. Shelter sheds and a sandy galloping track. I jumped with my things and walked down the railroad siding towards them as the train ground off and squawked behind me.
A scrawny stable boy not much bigger than me was pouring buckets of grain in feeders. I put my children’s saddle down behind a painted shed.
“Where’s the owner?” I asked him.
“Mr. Delauney.” The boy pointed to a red-faced man with a pipe against the post-and-rail track watching horses gallop.
“Do you need a rider?” I asked the man.
“Where did you appear from?”
“Off the train. I’m a jockey from the bush. I won the Birdsville Cup.” It was the only race I’d heard of.
He let me ride a chestnut two-year-old in a round white yard. “Someone help Train Boy with his things,” he said to a groom. Delauney didn’t ask me for my name. I wondered if I’d fooled him into thinking I was a jockey, or if it was obvious I was twelve years old.
Six years I worked for M. L. Delauney at Sutton Grange. I broke and galloped the young thoroughbreds, cleaned out straw, and fed out hay to his brood mares. I learnt to gag their mouths and file their teeth; I rode his jumping horses. If I made myself too tired to think, I could sleep without dreams that would wake me. If I slept sitting up, it was a primeval man who would run through the trees, his coat sprouting manes of dark horses, or sometimes it was my mother in clay.