At eleven o’clock Steve went on the air for his medical calls and prescribed some treatments: there was nothing serious, nothing that couldn’t be attended to by the taking of some medicine or pills from the stations’ medical chests. He idly wondered if Keating had come to the hospital while he was here in town to stock up the medical chest at Emu Downs; he made a note to check with Hudson. When he had finished with the radio schedule and listened to a joke Sid Price had heard on an earlier schedule, a joke he had heard two years before in Sydney and which he had never thought very funny but which reduced Sid Price almost to an hysterical wreck, he had then returned to the hospital and made another round of the patients in the wards. Mrs. Linnane was now conscious, improving but still very weak: Steve looked at the lined ugly face, scarred with more defeats than one life deserved, and wondered for a moment if he had really helped her by saving her life. Then he had gone back to his office and wrote the weekly report that Covici had advised him must be written and sent south to the headquarters of the Flying Doctor Service. He signed his name to the report, feeling an impostor, and sat back. A doctor’s life ran to a basic pattern, and you fitted into it no matter where you were: Winnemincka, Sydney, London or New York: doctors all over the world were doing exactly as he had been doing for the past few hours. All that would be missing from the patterns of the others would be the heat, the flies and the informality of his dress: he wore shorts, shirt and sandals and somehow he could not bear to think of what it would be like in a suit and wearing a collar and tie. Downhill to the beach if not the grave, he thought: the next step is the bottle of gin before lunch. And that reminds me I’m thirsty.
He got up and went out of the hospital and was crossing the garden to his cottage when he saw Keating draw up at the gate in his truck. He stopped, hesitated for a moment, then walked down the path to the gate. “Have you come to stock up your medical chest?”
Keating nodded without replying. He lifted the medical chest from the back of the truck and came in the gate, moving past Steve. The latter stepped aside, angry at the rebuff and at himself. He would have done better to have ignored Keating, to have gone on into the cottage. But he would be leaving here in a week or so and this might be the last time he would see Keating. He had made few friends during his life, but to the best of his knowledge he had made no enemies. It worried him, almost as if it were a stain on his character, that he should leave here without some attempt to arrive at an understanding with Keating. He knew it was impossible to be friendly with Keating, that the latter wouldn’t accept him on such a basis; but at least they might go back to what they were when they met, strangers with no hostility towards each other. It would be negative, and the crossing of men’s paths was meant to achieve more than that; but it was better than enmity. He put out his hand.
“I’ll be leaving here pretty soon, Keating. I’d like to say I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot.”
Keating looked down at the outstretched hand; he held the medical chest against his stomach with both hands and made no effort to return the proffered handshake. “I want no part of you, McCabe, not a skerrick. Not even if I was dying, you unnerstand? The quicker you get outa Winnemincka, the quicker we’ll get a doc who knows his job.”
He turned and stomped up the path, walking heavily, the medical chest clutched against his stomach, his big broad buttocks tight in his trousers, the whole back of him as insulting and final as a door closed in the face.
Steve stood there in the glare and heat, oblivious of the flies, aware only of the retreating Keating and the gins in the garden staring with frank appreciation at his discomfiture: they enjoyed nothing so much as a fight or an argument between two whites: it was one of the few things left to the town blacks that assured them of their superiority. They stared now at Steve and he knew that he was the defeated one: he could see the contempt on their black shining faces. Suddenly he hated them, hated everything: Keating, Winnemincka, the wilderness beyond the town. Fury boiled within him: he was like a schoolboy hit on the nose in a dormitory brawl: he was blind with anger, but who was there to hit?
He crossed the garden, walking unheedingly through a bed of flowers, and almost ran up the steps into his cottage. The screen door banged behind him and the flies on his back flew up into the air: he had brought them here into the screened veranda with him and now he would have to spray them. He found the spray gun and sprayed savagely, homicidally: he would have liked to have sprayed the town, the whole bloody Kimberleys, out of existence. Then he heard someone laughing and he spun round.
“That’s it, Doc. Kill the bastards!” Billy Brannigan stood there, his hands cocked to imitate guns. “Ratatatatatat! Mow ’em down!”
Steve lowered the gun, feeling foolish; he had been holding it before him as if it were a tommy-gun. Anger that a spectator doesn’t understand always looks foolish; and Billy certainly wouldn’t understand his behaviour of the last few moments. He tried to make a joke of it. “These bloody flies – I’ve declared war on them—”
“You’ll never win, Doc.” Billy dropped into one of the chairs on the veranda; he had come to stay for a while. “I’ve been reading how the Commos have eliminated all the flies in China. I’d like to see them have a go here in real cattle country like this. You can’t win. Death, taxes and flies – you can’t beat ’em, Doc.”
Steve remembered why he had originally started towards the house. He went inside, found two bottles of beer in the refrigerator, and brought them and two glasses out to the veranda. The first mouthful of beer tasted of fly-spray; the second tasted like beer. He leaned back in the old cane chair: he was so tired it even felt comfortable. A fly crawled slowly up his bare leg: he watched it, a mountaineer on a steep hair-forested slope. It’s progress got slower, as if groggy with altitude; then it fell to the floor with the other sprayed flies. How did the Communists rid China of flies? he wondered; and had a crazy vision of six hundred million Chinese tearing over the landscape with spray-guns. He drained his glass and refilled it.
“The beer is all right up here,” Billy said, lounging in his chair, one leg crooked over the arm of the chair. Every inch the handsome adventurer, Steve thought: in his rakishly worn cap, the immaculately pressed shirt and shorts and the fancy riding-boots he looked more like a film actor cast for the part than a man who actually did the job that was his. Steve wondered what substitute he would find for the riding-boots when he went south. “But I’m told the beer down in Sydney is all right, too. Sydney beer and Sydney girls—” He looked at Steve from under the peak of the cap. “Talking of girls, Kate seems pretty gone on you.”
“Oh?” Steve hid behind his glass. “What’s she been saying?”
“Nothing. That’s how I know. Oh, I can read women like a book—” He waved a confident hand: he took his place with Kinsey and Casanova. “She went through breakfast this morning without a word. Usually she’s like most women at breakfast – talks the leg off an iron pot.” Steve wondered where he had got this knowledge of the behaviour of women at breakfast. “What did you do to her last night?”
“Nothing.” The bloody hide of him, talking to me as if he were some paragon of virtue. How would he react if I asked him what he did to Betty Pilcher last night?
“You sure?”
“Don’t annoy me too far, Billy,” he said. “For the record, I think your sister is a nice girl.”
“I know she is,” said Billy, unperturbed by the rebuke. “But you’ve done something to her, whether you meant to or not. I’m telling you, Doc. I wouldn’t want her to get in too deep. She’s been hurt once. And I know it’s going to hurt her when I go south – but I can’t help that. I just wouldn’t want her hurt any more. A girl can take just so much.” He sipped on his beer and stared out through the screens round the veranda. “Even a Winnemincka girl.”
“And what about Pilcher?”
Billy turned his head sharply, spilling beer as he poured himself another glassful. “What about her?”
“She gave notice this morning. She’s leaving next week for Melbourne.”
“Oh—!” Billy dabbed with a handkerchief at the beer stains on his shorts: it was hard to tell whether he was concerned about his shorts or about Pilcher. Then he looked up and Steve was surprised how young he looked: all the confidence was gone, and there was no woman in the world that he was sure of. “Why did she do that?”
Steve shrugged: he felt a selfish sadistic pleasure in the way he had turned away the case against himself. “What did you do to her last night?”
“I don’t have to answer that.” He sounded frightened, and yet a little ridiculous: he knew the law, he knew his rights, you didn’t have to say anything that would incriminate you.
Steve was too tired to continue the cross-questioning. It was none of his business anyway: Pilcher was free, white and twenty-one, and that entitled her to make a fool of herself. Up till now he had managed to avoid entanglement in other people’s affairs: he trod carefully the way back to isolation, to non-involvement: he drew up the drawbridge of self-interest: “I don’t really want to know. All I want is to be left alone till I go south myself. Next week,” he said, and it was like a challenge: he named the deadline, and they could take it or leave it.
Billy stood up, glad to be freed: his beer remained un-drunk in his glass. “I’ve got to go. You coming with me tomorrow? There’s more mail to go out, and stores.”
“I’ll come.” It would be a break, another day out of the waiting time.
Billy left the veranda, closing the screen door quickly against the flies trying to get in. He went along the path, turned towards the gate, stopped, then turned back and went up the steps into the hospital. Steve idly tried to remember whether Pilcher was on duty or not. Down south, at the big hospitals, nurses were not allowed to be visited by their boy-friends while on duty. Love, and the problems of love, ranked with streptococci in the routine of a big city hospital. Pilcher would be safer if she went south.
Steve finished his beer. He lay sprawled in the chair, too weary, both physically and mentally, to move. He saw Keating come out of the hospital and go down to his truck leaning back against the weight of the medical chest. Keating put the chest in the back of the truck, lit a cigarette, then climbed into the truck and drove off down the street, heading out of town towards the scrub. He had a two-hundred-mile drive in front of him, two days’ hard driving over rough tracks, and he set off as casually as a man might get into his car in Sydney and drive out into the suburbs. Steve felt a reluctant admiration for the man.
Far down at the end of the street, on the edge of town, the truck stopped for a moment. At that distance and in the shimmering haze it was impossible to distinguish why the truck had pulled up; perhaps Keating had forgotten something and was coming back. Then Steve saw that the truck was moving again and a moment later it was gone from sight. Only the dust of its movement remained, then that, too, had gone, drifting into the air and becoming part of the shimmer that lay over the plain. The noon heat pressed down on the town, and with the truck gone there was no movement at all in the street. The corellas had gone from the tree beside the hospital, and the town seemed to lie under a heavy steamy blanket of silence. Steve could not remember ever having seen anything so lifeless: it was like a state of mind in which there was no memory and no hope.
He lay back in the chair, closing his eyes, and almost instantly fell asleep. Beyond the wire screen a lone fly cruised lazily and patiently, like a spy for death.
Here the scrub, the pindan, came almost down to the shore. They drove down through it, under the bright red beans of bauhinia trees, past the champagne-bottle shapes of some young boabs, through an orange-yellow snowstorm as petals flaked down from a manuam tree. Gum-oozing bloodwoods glittered like tall columns of quartz, and a clump of wongi trees blazed against the gaze like a bright yellow explosion. Pink everlastings and mauve star-flowers glowed among the waving buffle-grass, and beyond the pindan, on the edge of the plain, a cluster of ant-hills stood like a battalion of brown sundowners with green swags of spinifex at their feet.
They passed some clay-pans and saw two brolgas, tall long-legged birds, going through their weird dance: it was uncanny to watch their movements, so precise and human: they moved like grey ghosts through a dreamlike minuet. Grey-pink galahs wheeled in like a sunset cloud, and when they passed a billabong a vast flock of ducks rose up and went across the sky like a billow of. dark smoke. A mob of wild donkeys, two or three hundred of them, spun away and went across the plain with a turbulence of wobbling rumps. Some kangaroos broke cover and bounced away into the haze, growing smaller and smaller till they were just a jigging tic in the eye. They passed wild pigs, barrelling away in panic through the pindan, climbed a hill and saw a mob of brumbies, wild horses with thick coats and awkward heads, grazing in a small valley down below the track, and disturbed three eagles as they tore at the corpse of a wild donkey. Then they came down a long gentle slope and on to a beach of hard white sand.
They went in swimming, riding the breakers of the surf but not going out too far because of the sharks, then came ashore and lay in the hot sun on the sands. They both put on dark glasses against the blinding glare, and Steve went back to the truck and brought down Kate’s stockman’s hat and his own panama. As alone on the beach as two castaways, they acted with the stiff formality of strangers on a blind date. It had been that way since they had left Winnemincka forty minutes before, and Steve had begun to wonder why Kate had bothered to come.
“Pilcher is going south next week,” he said.
“Yes.” She could have been discussing the weather: the Wet was due in another fortnight, it was inevitable. “I’ve been expecting it.”
She was lying on her stomach, and Steve saw that her back was already dry. He could feel the sun eating his skin and he knew he was going to be burnt if he sat out here on the sands too long. It was humid even here on the beach, and as fast as the water dried on him he could feel the sweat beginning to come through. He looked out at the surf, cool and inviting but he wasn’t going to risk going back in there. She had only told him about the sharks after they had been in the water five minutes, casually mentioning the possibility of them as if the were no more than bluebottles: an aboriginal boy had been taken here a couple of months ago, she had said, as if the boy had no more than cut his foot on a rock in the surf. He had stayed there in the water, feeling the scar on his thigh suddenly burn, deathly afraid but afraid also of her scorn if he showed his fear: the boy in the man who mustn’t make a fool of himself in front of a girl. Cowards were the wise ones of this world; and yet he had never pretended to be a hero. Unconsciously she had shamed him into staying in the water, with the scar burning like a red-hot poker laid against his thigh all the time; and he had wondered if Rona could have done the same thing to him. He had almost collapsed with relief when Kate had at last made for the shore; and now, no matter how hot and uncomfortable he might become, he was not going back into the water. He had only another week up here and he was not going to risk his life again just to retain her respect. He put his hand down to the scar on his thigh, burning now from the sun, and turning over at that moment she saw the scar for the first time.
“How did that happen?”
“A shark. When I was fourteen.” He tried to sound as casual as she when she had told him about the mauled aboriginal boy.
But her reaction was not what he had expected. She sat up quickly, putting out a hand to turn his thigh towards her so that she could see the scar more distinctly: it showed, pale and ugly, like the smudged chalk-drawing of a snake, against the tan of his skin. “But how can you still go in swimming! I mean, I’d be scared to death!”
Suddenly he laughed, relaxed and no longer afraid: he knew he would not have to go back into the water. “I didn’t know about the sharks here—” He laughed again: he was like the soldier who had learned he no longer had to go back into battle, that the war was over. He put his hand on hers and didn’t realise till too late that one danger had passed and another taken its place.
She had leant forward till her face was only inches from his own. The dark glasses hid her eyes – it could have been Rona there behind them: the colonel’s lady and Rosie O’Grady and all the women of the world were sisters under the dark glasses. But the mouth was Kate’s and there was no mistaking its message. He could feel the pain in his thigh again, but it was not the scar burning this time: it was the clutch of her hand. Slowly, afraid and yet unable to resist, as if he were re-entering the water where the sharks already cruised, he leaned forward and kissed her.
“Oh, Steve!” She fell against him and he put his arms about her. He sat awkwardly on the sand, his legs stretched out in front of him trying to support the weight of her just by stiffening his spine: he sat stiffly and primly, like a Methodist on Coogee beach whose girl had suddenly turned wanton. He giggled inwardly, afraid that if he tried to explain the mental image that was tickling him she might be offended and hurt. And he was determined that he was not going to hurt her, no matter to how small a degree. Slowly, carefully, he lay back till he was flat on the sand and she lay across him. He was staring straight up into the sun and he raised a hand and tilted the panama forward over his eyes.
Under the shadow of the hat he saw her clearly as she lay on him. Her own hat had fallen off, but she seeemed unaware of it. He could see the dark hair, every strand of it, shining where the sun lay on it and black at the roots where the sweat was beginning to run; a strand of it blew across his eyes for a moment and he saw a lone gull, cruising above the surf, caught in the tangle of it; then the hair and the gull blew away, and he was looking at the smooth brown curve of her shoulder. Moving only his eyes he followed the curve down till it became the angle of her elbow; the arm disappeared from his sight then and he could only continue the tracing of it by the feel of it and her hand beneath his own shoulder. He could feel most of her: her breasts against the hardness of his ribs, the smoothness of her back beneath his hands, the press of her pelvic bone against his hip, the soft thrust of her chin against his collar-bone. I’m safe, he thought. When I can look at her as clearly as this, I’m safe. And so is she – which is more important.
“Betty Pilcher is not going back to Melbourne.” Her voice was indistinct; he could feel her lips moving against his skin as she spoke. “She’s going to Sydney.”
“How do you know?” Why was she talking about Pilcher now?
“She told me. Billy doesn’t know. She doesn’t want anyone to know. She’s chasing him to Sydney.”
“Why are you telling me?”
She raised her head, blocking out the sun: he could see nothing of her face now, only the silhouette of her head. “I’d come to Sydney.”
“No!” He sat up quickly; she fell back almost as if he had thrown her from him. She lay for a moment with her head in his lap, the dark glasses knocked from her face; he saw the shocked hurt look in her eyes, and instantly he fumbled to comfort her: “We’d have to talk about it – you said you couldn’t stand the city—”
She sat up, replacing the dark glasses: she was like a knight retreating behind his visor, shutting out the enemy he had thought he could trust. “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said flatly. She had been hurt before, she knew the meaning of the danger flags: she had let down her defences for a moment, but it was not going to happen again.
“Don’t let’s quarrel—”
“I’m not quarrelling.” She spoke with the stiff pride of a child: he half-expected her to hum a snatch of song to show she didn’t care.
“Kate—” Far out beyond the breakers something broke the surface of the bright blue sea: a shark? He looked down at his thigh, saw the scar and beside it the slowly-fading mark of her fingers.
The stiff pride went out of her: she sounded bitter, almost threatening: “I said there’s nothing to talk about!”
“There is,” he said quietly and stood up. His shadow was flung across her, and she looked all at once small and lost. “There’s a lot to talk about. But I don’t know if there’s time – if it would do any good. I didn’t come up here to fall in love, Kate—”
“Who said anything about love?” Oh God, he thought why doesn’t she grow up? But there was no anger or irritation in the thought: only a sad pity. She seemed to have learned nothing from the tragedy of her first marriage; she still exposed herself like an unhappy adolescent. Although, he thought, trying to be fair, trying to be without conceit, perhaps she was not in love. Perhaps she had turned to him out of loneliness, perhaps she was one with the half-caste girls; and yet he knew he was insulting her by thinking such thoughts, that there was a world of difference between her and Mary Hammond.
“I think we’d better go back.” He picked up his towel and a small crab scuttled away from beneath it. A gull dived out of nowhere and a moment later the crab was being carried out to sea; other gulls rose up from the blue swell and the crab-carrying gull swerved away, pursued by the screeching colony. He stood for a moment watching the pursuit; whoever got it, the crab was doomed. And all because he had picked up his towel, exposing it just as the gull had passed over. “Poor crab.”
“You get used to things like that.” She stood up beside him, not looking towards where the gulls had disappeared, no inflection at all in her voice. “It’s the survival of the fittest.”
Then he grabbed her, his hands biting deeply into her shoulders. He stood without bending, almost lifting her up to him. “You may be used to things like that! I’m not! I’m a doctor – and I’m dedicated to the survival of the weakest as well as the strongest. Don’t put on the brave front for me, Kate – don’t try to tell me you’ll survive! Falling in love – don’t deny it, you are in love! – it may be something quick and deadly for you, but it isn’t for me. I fall in love slowly, it’s the way I’m made. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be hurt while it’s happening, that I can’t feel bewildered while it’s all going on. I’m just as much at sea as that poor bloody crab—”
“Meaning I swooped on you like that gull? You’re hurting my shoulders.”
He let her go, and she dropped back on her heels in the sand. “No. No, I don’t mean that at all.” The anger had gone out of him; he no longer wanted to hurt her as he had a moment ago. “Kate, I like you—”
“Like?” The bitter sarcasm was like sour spittle on her lips.
He flared: “God Almighty, have I promised you any more? One kiss! Where were you brought up – in a convent or something? Didn’t your husband—” Then he stopped.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mention him.”
“It’s all right.” She was in complete control of herself; he was the one like the unhappy adolescent now. “You’d better put your shoes on. You might cut your feet.”
There was a bank of dried coral just below where they had parked the truck: the sea had once rolled in across this beach, had once formed a big lagoon where the scrub now grew. They climbed up the bank, the crabs burrowing back into the crevices beneath their shoes. They got into the truck and Steve drove it carefully back towards the track that headed for Winnemincka. As they turned on to the track Kate suddenly cried, “Stop!” and he slammed on the brakes. Without another word she took the rifle from the ledge above the back of the seat, opened the door of the truck and slid out. She raised the rifle and Steve looked in the direction at which she aimed. Something lay in the dust of the track: it looked like a small log. The rifle cracked and the log jumped, fell back, writhed and was still. Without even bothering to go closer to make sure her shot had done its job, Kate climbed back into the truck.
“A taipan,” she said. “It’s bite is supposed to be the deadliest of any Australian snake.”
“I’ve heard of them.” He was surprised that he had to struggle to keep his voice from shaking. I could never get used to this life up here, he thought. Death was everywhere, he had learned that lesson as a doctor; but in the city it wore more disguises, was at times lost among the crowds. Up here it seemed to stare you in the face at every bend in the road: a signpost with no name but which needed none: it was everyone’s destination. But he was not a fatalist and he preferred the camouflage of deceit: the car that looked like any other but which, unknown to you, was the one marked to run you down, the innocent-looking electric light switch that was faulty, the virus that began only as a tickle in the nose. He moved the truck across the body of the taipan, crushing it into the dust, and drove on.
“Kate,” he said, speaking carefully, driving carefully. He wanted no interruptions: twice the truck had stalled in the dust on its way down. “If I wrote to you from Sydney, would you answer the letters?”
She looked obliquely at him: she too was being careful: caution was as thick in the cabin of the truck as the smell of the petrol that leaked up from the engine. “It would depend on the letters.”
“If I wrote at all, they would be more than just newsy letters. Or chatty ones. I’m not fond of writing letters,” he said, remembering the difficulty of composing the one to Rona.
“I won’t promise anything,” she said.
“I’ll write,” he said. “One way or the other, I’ll write.”
“I’m not promising anything,” she said stubbornly, but there was no adamancy in her voice: she had killed the taipan easily and with confidence, but she could not kill whatever it was she felt for him.