KINGSLEY COLTS SAT IN THE town park smoking and staring at cracks in the concrete between his boots. It was a Saturday afternoon. Roars of hope and disappointment came from the football ground where he’d mistimed his ref’s whistle and allowed two giants their moment of destruction. The event was long-remembered but nobody blamed Colts the way he blamed himself. There he sat through the one afternoon of the week when he’d lost himself in the game, and lost some part of his will or drive as a consequence.
Isabel Junction was a town of rusting metal roofs and termite-eaten verandah posts emblematic of the Australian scene. Tragedy came from shadows of clouds, wind in the hills’ puffy cheeks brought it on – drive your car into a tree, fry yourself on an overhead line, drown in your bath, allow two giants their moment of destruction. The Greeks had a name for it: goat-song. You had to laugh. It might have been you next time but wasn’t. If you started a grassfire when your slasher hit rocks, throwing sparks, or made some other sort of trivial error, soon rectified, you were never forgiven by Randolph Knox. In Colts’s case the misdemeanour, so huge it cleft his life into before and after, was not talked about, not even by Randolph except to his cat: Vince Powell’s injury in the match Colts had controlled, or rather had not controlled in the moment that counted.
Frosty with knowingness Randolph was not exempt from joining the general populace on the point. Colts was a lonely wonder, great as a statue cracked by lightning and dripping with marble tears. Randolph would always remember with a shudder of complicity that a lesser Knox cousin had struck half the blow, leaving Vince Powell paralysed. It bound him to Colts with canny possessiveness. Together they memorialised a moment of legendary life. It could never be taken away.
Shambling up the hill on his way to the game, wearing a green trilby, a red MacFarlane clan scarf and carrying a shooting stick, Randolph came to where Colts sat in Pioneers Park rolling a smoke.
They talked as if there’d been no years of sustained almost-silence. Colts licked the dry glue of the Tally-Ho with the tip of his tongue.
‘They’ve kicked off,’ said Randolph looking down at his shoes. Then he looked up and met Colts’s troubled eyes.
Colts angled his head to indicate he’d heard, and at the same time, low by his pocket, extracted a match from a matchbox with the fingers of one hand and struck a flame.
‘You’re not coming?’
‘There’s goats and kings,’ said Colts, sucking in smoke. ‘Or have you forgotten?’
‘No need for that,’ said Randolph. ‘“Kings are earth’s gods, in vice their law’s their will, and if Jove stray, who dares say, Jove doth ill?”’
‘Do say,’ said Colts. ‘I’m impressed.’ There was a long pause then. ‘Suppose I should say thanks,’ he added, not quite understanding, or rather, not understanding quite what Randolph meant, except it was pretentious yet seemed to be a statement of something he ought to attach importance to, possibly respect.
There was a tour of Shakespeare for Schools that week, with Randolph sitting in the front row leading the applause for the young cast, just as he had at Stratford in the ’50s when he saw Larry and Vivien, as he called the Oliviers with strained familiarity.
‘Come to the play tonight.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Colts.
Randolph had seen it twice.
‘Well, then, afterwards, meet them in the Lounge Bar.’
It’s forgotten the glittering comets that roared across rural skies bringing utmost sophistication and unbridled bad behaviour to country towns: a cast of men and girls in their twenties, priapic young egomaniacs playing the poet–prince and cutting a swathe through loveliness with its legs in the air.
Drinks were on Randolph as he introduced Colts to the lead, Fred Donovan, who played Richard III, Bottom and Malvolio in an anthology of scenes, and still had smudged kohl-eyes after dashing from school hall to bar. ‘He’s only twenty-seven,’ Randolph said. ‘Tremendously close to genius.’ Later he said, ‘They’re university students. He’s doing architecture, final year. He holds the Lady Margaret Hovell Scholarship for Promising Design, quite a coup. They say he’ll get the University Medal after a rocky start. He went to Cranbrook.’
That was a school of a better sort down the hill from their old school overlooking Sydney Harbour. During their estrangement Randolph had missed the pleasure of uniting elements of Colts’s early life with the way he lived now. It was something Colts was unable to do himself, Randolph believed, a matter of laying gifts of understanding at Colts’s feet, he was the sphinx of provocation.
Soon the cast went out of control with jugs of Reschs and crushed packets of crisps strewn underfoot, bare-legged girls sitting on the knees of shearers and stagehands plucking noisy guitars. Randolph was left forgotten except for his wallet. Colts saw Donovan, a stocky young man, leaning a young woman from the cast against a backstairs wall and shoving his hands up her dress.
Colts wandered out the back where timber offcuts burned in a forty-four gallon drum. The blaze lit faces. One of them was Alan Hooke’s, seen dancing with that reckless girl, Barbara, to the thump of ‘Satisfaction’ played from a portable gramophone on the tailgate of a ute. Most of the time Colts was numb, but here like this he could let himself go. Far older than this crowd (Hooke was barely eighteen) Colts rock-and-rolled like an ape, laughter showing his teeth. Everyone became a shadow at midnight; they mingled as one. In the mornings he’d remember little, till the return of creeping shame. Sunday mornings: Vince Powell would be sitting in the front row pew at St Aidan’s, strapped to his chair with leather belts holding down his convulsions. Alan Hooke would be in the choir.
Randolph Knox was away most weekends but that hardly mattered over what he knew. See how Colts tripped from Lounge Bar to Public Bar and back again and out to the yard. Know how a clean, lean bloke fell into habits so fast he seemed since the year of Vince Powell’s mauling to belong to their shape – stumbling into the night with Tub Maguire and other humans long stripped of shame around port wine and proof spirits.
Vince Powell’s funeral was conducted by the bishop, attended by half the synod. Maguires came from all over the country, rolling up in old cars held together by hope and binder twine. A former ship’s bosun piped the coffin home. Pamela Slim wearing black was one of the women comforting Jenny Powell. She came over from the tragic side of town: some thought The Crow had never left it, the way she appeared at the end of that street, leading to the town common, where nobody went except the garbage lorry attended by garbage men and kids who never went to school.
When the cortege arrived at the cemetery, its tail end was still crowding the herringbone brick pathways of St Aidan’s. On Cemetery Hill, in sight of swimming hole and rugby field, Normie Powell came forward at a prearranged moment and kicked a football into the grave. Randolph disliked the gesture as it seemed foreign to the restraint required of custom as old as the worn earth itself: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What made it worse was it was done with a showy drop-kick, greeted by applause.
There were wakes all over the town. Total strangers cried. Colts’s reprobate companions included Randolph’s younger brother, Tim. Then came a bunch of Tim’s friends renting a farmhouse and outbuildings along an eroded creek sixteen kilometres from town. They seemed to be part of a criminal class at the same time as they wrote their PhDs. It was a time of disintegration, disrespect, disenchantment, disaccord.
The effect of the times on Colts, as far as Randolph could tell, was to spoil his appearance. He grew his hair long. It looked like a horror show dangling around his cadaverous stock agent’s skinny frame. The times were childish with their idiot games of skinny-dipping and gold-capped mushroom hunts. Acting your age was a test of character. Randolph went all out for culture in cravat and suede shoes. Ted Merrington, the scrap-metal merchant with a private school background and a noisy basso profundo, praised Randolph as a man of taste and Randolph lapped up the flattery, seating Merrington at dinner parties near the traymobile handy to the wine and advising him on livestock and land values on the Isabel.
A name worth collecting came up: Veronica Buckler.
‘You want?’ said Randolph, high on gin and bitter lemon.
‘A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse, Randy.’
All was small gains, but ‘be thankful for small mercies’ was Randolph’s motto around the restored friendship with Colts. Summers without Colts at cricket, winters without him at rugby. This was how life was now, they were used to it. The bung-lunged cross-country athlete was gone. The sportsman Colts, the great sheep-classer Colts – protégé of Captain Oakeshott, equal of Otway Falkiner and Basil Clapham – the genial recounter of episodes in New Guinea coastwatching, had left town leaving a slurred cheerio.
The man remaining had the same name, same face, same genial consideration, same bellows-wheeze after effort. But still with that forsaken and preoccupied, faraway look a boy had on Eureka. Colts did the same work but never as peerlessly as once. You couldn’t help liking him still. You called him Kings, and he was royal like that. You felt helpless to watch. He just needed a bloody haircut and the stuffing put back in him.
There were explanations, deeds, actions and amends. By the late ’70s, Colts was Alan Hooke’s baby daughters’ childhood Uncle Kingsley. Alan had married the reckless Barbara. Colts was Tim Knox and Pepita Wolmsley’s boozy, wiser older friend. They too had children. Randolph marched on Anzac Day, wearing his older brother Sandy’s medals. Colts, a returned man, did not.
Colts was on Pamela Slim’s visiting list after all this time. They were, though the word was not used, lovers. Still rootin’ was the descriptive phrase applied to the situation.
Pamela caught the slow train down from Sydney, doing embroidery and reading hefty novels. Lost in thought she turned a page with a licked finger and looked out the window. On the historical side, reading taught her opposites combined, leaving nothing to argue about. Small towns obeyed the conventions of empires, curtains drawn between acts. Lonely sidings with eucalyptus trees and dusty roads leading out at right angles had a Chekhovian precedence: the epitome of provincial summer afternoons with their muffled couplings in tin-roofed homesteads.
Talk of an affair in past years between stock agent (‘randy as a goat’) and schoolteacher’s wife (‘can’t get enough of it’) was condensed down to the reality of the everyday. Nobody gossiped anymore on who collected whom from the train, where they went or what they did banging the headboards in Woodbox Gully till dogs along the creek bank throttled themselves barking at the end of their chains past midnight. Not even Randolph Knox.
The only one messing it up was Eddie Slim, a dream of bad conscience. Nothing explained him. His mother was at a loss. Dialectical materialism had no answers. Theology might have an answer with its talk of original sin. Ever since Eddie did over the town’s milk money on a moonlit night there’d been galloping disappointment. He would be, in a novel, the spoiler returning to make an impossible gripe: con man, card sharp, petty thief, pretender to the throne. At seventeen the Institute for Industrial Psychology in Hunter Street did a test, ranking him capable. And he was. But badness was a virus undetectable in any test.
Pamela was a middle-aged woman now, thicker of figure but moving with her weight balanced like a dancer, showing grace and fine beauty in a pair of tailored slacks and a linen blouse unbuttoned at the throat. If it seemed inexplicable that she would give herself to a man like Colts, remember her themes were pity and disappointment as well as a somewhat anti-doctrinaire contrariness, hammered on the anvil of her married life. ‘A woman’s natural mission was to find where she was most appreciated and the point was to find out where that was’ – this from another of her hefty novels. Well, she had tried.
‘Shine a light into yourself,’ she’d said to Colts, on more than one occasion doing his thinking for him around what he needed to do, in a woman’s way; but as well ask him to wield a crowbar and crack himself open or blow his brains out.
He couldn’t, though he knew what she meant. Just sometimes the openings asked of a man came good, but hardly long enough to count, and life at the best of times was a camera lens jammed hardly wider than a slit. Everything that counted had happened in his early life, even before he was born. He could not be, and never would be, what he was meant to be, what he’d been told he would be when a man: Kingsley Colts, son of the late Colonel Colts, the father he’d never known, ward of such legacy as worlds were made from, to become ‘Dunc Buckler’s kid’. He was a particular reason why a great war had been fought, why a continent was planted with homesteads and fenced, in opposition to desolation. But sometimes Colts woke in the mornings and took in the full gush of light. Then it was good, and the world was ready for him. He smiled, and looked at Pamela wonderingly.
She had learned what few knew: that Colts was a naturally generous man. Hard working, unambitious, helpful. With all that there was the bafflement a woman liked teasing out. She had come knocking at his door when Eddie was a boy. Jack was ill that winter and she’d sought the name of a yardman to get firewood for the classroom and school residence stoves. Colts had no idea of his own best side: within half a day he had the places stacked with logs and trucks arriving with more. He’d done all the splitting and stacking himself and Jack never had to work the woodpile again. A man was not himself unless he excelled himself. Nothing in nature was. She saw it in Colts. She heard Colts drawing raspy breath and was moved by the effort taken. When Colts placed his hand on her head, strangely like a blessing, or watched her moving around the room, picking up her sewing, or standing at the window looking at the alabaster white of frost in the yard, and he smiled at her, rather hesitantly, as in a dream intractable to understanding, she felt a great peacefulness completely irrelevant to the torment of the century (which Jack marched to) or her personal life (where her direct pain was set). Most people had to reach up in life in order to make themselves. Colts was an example of someone who’d needed to reduce or detract from himself in order to get down to what mattered in himself, the contained seed of himself always just out of reach in the soup of failure.
Pamela sat up on the pillows and Colts brought her a pot of tea. He made her laugh by pouring it from high above the cup. She had a rush of feeling, so grateful she was for such moments. ‘I have to say,’ she said, ‘that I could get used to this.’
This was strange of her, as they’d had something like it over the years. The routine of the teapot. The routine of the buttered toast. Always reliable. Always the same. Never varying, a Craven A on the bedside ashtray ready. Nothing more ever asked.
‘What do you mean,’ Colts looked away as he spoke, ‘“get used”?’
‘Well, Kings,’ said Pamela, a bit tensely, a bit searchingly and penetratingly defensive. ‘I might even learn what it’s like to be truly loved.’
Staggered, Colts thought, This can’t be me.
There would already have been phone calls starting at six a.m., Hooke & Hooke clients dictating his day. He’d be leaving the house around seven. That was enough for her, and what she returned for, what she found in their adulterous friendship: his gaze on parting or arrival, looking out from a settled world where nothing ever changed if he could help it. She’d never asked what it was for him beyond the craving of touch. Colts never wrote inviting her, it was she who made the choice of when to come. To pick up a telephone or send a telegram was unthinkable on his part. Patterns of nature, seasons and other people’s needs besides theirs were involved. Advised by mail, he’d be at the station to greet her, or not, depending on his work movements all over the countryside. She would go to his house then and tidy it up. There was never much to do. Colts would live, if need be, from a cardboard carton or a Globite suitcase. And had.
Later she’d walk to the wrong side of town and visit the Maguires. He’d return to find her sitting on the verandah marking her place at around page nine hundred. ‘Oh, Kings, there you are – just listen to this.’
He’d gaze at her while she read him a passage, giving his fullest attention, then he’d go in and put the kettle on. There was no incessant twitter of the intellectual sort, where nothing was ever resolved. He’d taken her on train-droving trips where they’d travelled through pastoral landscapes, where it was hardly believable they weren’t on a rattling ride through paradise. His acceptance was profound.
Although Pamela never said a word against her husband or son, she took that gaze of Colts’s back with her to be with them. Kings never took a stand on anything much, compared with the stands lives of principle demanded – hers, Jack’s. There was none of that old-time rancour of the right – Buckler’s – left for Kings to work, except he sometimes said, when election day came round, that he inoculated himself against the bile of Hooke & Hooke clients by sheltering his pencil in his elbow in the voting booth and voting for whoever he damned well liked. There were years when he did that, he said, against the best interests of the rural rump royal: he meant Randolph, a Country Party somebody. Pamela alone of all Colts’s friends and acquaintances – save Randolph – knew the impulse related to Buckler more than anyone, to maintaining the true life he’d made for himself over against Buckler’s tremendous influence on him as a boy. After the war Buckler had stepped back onto the earth as an extraordinary aged ape, he was now in his eighties, but in Colts’s dreams still drove an old finger-slapper grader with clusters of lightning bolts sparking from the blade. Colts was in animated suspension in regard to the passing of the years – his friends seemed to get younger and younger – lucky Colts, perhaps.
Jack Slim bent every rule in the book to keep Eddie from having convictions recorded against his name. Pamela likewise had never said no to their son, but argued it would teach Eddie nothing to fight it out for him through one or other of the QCs of the left who did Jack’s bidding. Colts spoke of farming equipment wheeled from sheds, with cars and tractors flogged not by Eddie perhaps but by a suspected bunch whose names along with Eddie’s stained the fledgling records of Isabel Junction Intermediate High.
Jack’s way won, the QCs won, and Eddie free as a bird swindled a mining partner in Western Australia and was back east driving a new Land Cruiser.
‘Not all that glitters is gold,’ said Pamela.
Eddie just stared at her, giving his mother that worst feeling, a son’s contempt of her as a woman.
‘Say I know what I know, not all gold’s dinkum, either,’ he said.
Jack was tinny too – like father, like son – but you had to be clever to see the switch from Jack’s better side – blasé about the affairs he had with his acolytes’ mothers in the suburb of grimy houses where they lived. Pamela was sick of catching him out, a weary habit, a tired game. She had her revenge with Colts. The country seemed to be where they had left their idealism, where she returned to find it. Jack had stayed in the CPA throughout. His consistency was finally questionable, overrated as a principle. The Battle of Stalingrad, Uncle Joe presiding, had taken place as far back as when he chewed sand in the deserts with Dunc Buckler. He had fused into an attitude – resistant to 1956 and 1968 and progressivist disillusion. The left and the right meeting up in a turned circle that seemed to be of her making: the worst came when Pamela destroyed the milky glass paperweight impervious to outside light, souvenir of a Moscow delegation, that he’d picked up and thrown at her when she’d said, ‘Jack, we might have been wrong.’
One day Randolph put his revived friendship with Colts to the test. He was not sure what overcame him. He supposed it was to see if their lives were in harmony, which was to say that if two lives were in harmony two men could quarrel, say anything they liked to each other, and the upshot would be they would still remain friends. The inspiration for the test was the gesture Randolph made decades ago when Colts returned from his postwar travels ready to settle down, a gesture of the lingering hand that had seemed to ruin their friendship. But only seemed.
‘Now who’s that up ahead bleak on the skyline like a scarecrow in the wind, hat brim blown back flat against his forehead?’
Colts. Eleven in the morning parked in a cold paddock corner, counting wethers jumping through a gate – Randolph surprised him in action – stood back admiringly, not interrupting, but mentally, automatically doing the count himself, as a sheep man did without knowing, whenever a mob started jumping.
‘Run them through again,’ said Randolph, coming up from behind. Colts gave a start. He was nine out from three hundred – no good.
Randolph stood at the door of Colts’s ute awaiting the re-count and happened to look down onto the seat to see a half-empty whisky bottle lying there, leaking its consolation to the floor.
‘Look here,’ said Randolph. ‘This is no good.’
He took over, finished the job. They were another man’s sheep and he saw them through. It was all quietly done, but with the effect of a bomb.
Randolph waited by the phone, by the letterbox to see if his bomb had result. To learn if taking a stand concerning Colts’s workaday drinking ‘marked the test’. He stood outside Hooke & Hooke in the stupendous winter cold of Gograndli Street and waited to learn if he’d made a mistake. If he had, it would be like a death, as in death experienced as ultimate act of bravery.
It was all right, though. Colts came to Randolph and said that if he ever wanted to own a house in town there was a property on the books with a stone cottage and a five-acre orchard on the side of the creek where he remembered Randolph saying, years ago, that a man could live out his days wearing a panama hat and tending his roses. Randolph was shy of that age but smiled as he took out his chequebook, thanked Colts for the tip, and wrote out the deposit.
That was the year the drought cut in worse than ever. Buckler turned eighty-seven. Rainfall was six inches, arid zone figures. As a benefit to his peace of mind, not to his Homegrove pastures, Randolph swore drought years were an expression of essential existence. Gaps opened in distances, leaves of gum forests thinned, winter cold came deep as a dry well. A lamb’s skeleton loomed on a bare hill larger than a mastodon but wool on Randolph’s prize flock grew fine as spun copper. Locusts ate leaves from fig trees on his town five acres and ate the washing from lines across the backyards and out across the plateau of the Upper Isabel where summer pastures, such as they were, withered. In shearing sheds locusts lodged in the wool of sheep waiting to be shorn. On blasted hillsides foxes were seen making spiral leaps to catch as many kick-leg mouthfuls as they could. Hooke did well buying irrigated lucerne bales from rare corners of the state where flushes of green were still to be found. Colts did time at the wheel of the agency semitrailer and took on those men of the Isabel, mean as cut snakes who had money to pay, but said it was robbery, the prices Hooke charged. Colts fined them a little extra by allowing a few bales gratis to the strugglers of Woodbox Gully. It was not something that Randolph would ever know through Colts telling him about it or anyone else telling him for that matter. Just something he knew.
Here it came again. Randolph kept a book on the cycles. Dry, dry, dry, wet, dry, dry. The rhythm was the click of a grasshopper’s legs on a hot afternoon. It was the rumble of rubber tyres on dusty corrugations. It was the rattle of dry lightning on the rusted heights of the Isabel Walls. Those cycles were Colts’s, but also Randolph’s own. There were days and weeks of dust parching the teeth. From the South Australian side it came – dust – as if Eureka Station (to give an example always in mind) picked itself up like a rippling carpet and was hurled a thousand miles east to pour over the cold plateau in galah colours. Feeder roads were impassable with dunes piling over fence posts. Tractors with buckets and council graders worked overtime clearing a way.
Crawling under a wattle bush on the drunks’ common near the Isabel River railway bridge – seeing the bridge’s rail line riding through cloud – a man was in the full cry of life experienced at its most calamitous extreme, existence concentrated to a limbless, armless ball of defeated energy still able to pass through solid earth to the condition of a worm flexing through the burial place of hopes.
Randolph went to AA meetings and took Colts along. Colts admitted AA had something to say about his shortcomings, but it had requirements a man couldn’t meet. Later under the stars he tipped back his throat. The gargle of firewater was stupendous. Colts read in the small book he was given to take home:
In desperate and hopeless conflict, a man stands very near to the gods, in a strength that may have its source in the utter absence of hope.
– Anonymous
That was it exactly. He knew the words in his bones. Talk about shining a light. Colts had read these lines in typescript on the banks of the Darling River when he was a boy. Now to come back to them with understanding was strange. A man’s battles were a longer test than a warfront’s, more insidious, more grinding you might say without death flicking you off. You could swill the word hope around on your tongue and throw it full to the back of your throat. Full, what a word. Then swallow and choke time.
Colts put a bottle on the table. Crash. Took a glass from the sink. Crash. Poured brandy and drank it neat, then tipped back the kitchen chair, keeping his balance with his hands locked behind his head and staring at the ceiling of knotted white cypress. He was angry with Pamela. Disappointed. Disillusioned. Whichever way he interpreted Pamela’s words they meant the same thing. They closed in on him. Weighed him down. Everything changed.
Randolph, an AA veteran who believed he was impervious to regression, was complacent that Buckler’s writings were gaining currency enough to save a few alcoholics without the vanity of acknowledgement. They’d never been out of touch. Since their first meeting at Eureka and subsequent correspondence on usage and abusage of written English, Randolph and Buckler had been allies in tackling the problem of Colts from opposite ends of the same struggle. It was, indeed, the motto under which they had met on Buckler’s terms. The problem had been Buckler’s – passing Colts along. The problem Randolph’s – what to do with him since: the two bound as one. The inadmissible faced with the inexplicable, you might say.
It was like working the land itself, a great big bloody challenging hardship getting successively worn down to the bones of gullies and sagging fence lines, the form not the substance the only reward.
Buckler wrote back thanking Randolph, and cursing the government to the grave and perdition. Politically Randolph and Buckler were of the same cloth, concurring that men of the right were beleaguered by the economics of working men (peasants, was Randolph’s clandestine word) holding employers to ransom. There was more, as Randolph revived lines of connection that had lain dormant too long. He sent Christmas cards to Faye, Colts’s sister, and to Colts’s stepmother, Veronica. They were his shadow in-laws and he always wanted their liking.
In replies addressed to Randolph as reliable, implying that her brother his friend was not, Faye wrote from outposts of the Great Sandy Desert where she taught black children in the smoke of campfires, under bough shelters thatched in spinifex. She and Boy Dunlap had thrown in their lot with a bunch of communistic blackfellows – infamous as such – Faye as teacher, Dunlap as linguist, dictionary-maker and self-taught expert on dryblower mining machinery and prices on the rare-metals market. Although Dunlap was a Red without question, Buckler helped out when passing on desert forays, putting pragmatism ahead of principle and giving of the opinion that if you couldn’t improve a blackfellow you could at least have a good laugh with him. Dunlap apparently never forgave Buckler’s writing in old magazines that missionaries were meddling fools, he (Dunlap) the original poodle-fakir, but having long since resigned from the ministry disillusioned with missions, didn’t fulminate overmuch when Buckler raved at him, a diamond-eyed dog growling at his toecaps and anthropological blowflies buzzing around him. Buckler was an old age campaigner of a sort made in Australia. The country ground them up and spat them out; they’d had to work out everything for themselves, and took on strange shapes doing it; mad hatters, misplaced geniuses, authentic ratbags. Veronica’s visits couldn’t have happened without Buckler providing the transport. It was worth it seeing how Faye enjoyed visits from Veronica. They came every second or third year. Each one felt like the last but wasn’t. Randolph waited for Colts to suggest a visit – two men in a truck camping out. None was forthcoming.
Colts helped a single mother, Janelle Pattison, find a house, helped her move in, and on his empty Saturday afternoons started going around to the house and cleaning out the yard.
Janelle’s son, Damon, attached himself to Colts. He was a sturdy, sullen twelve-year-old with black curly hair. He had trouble at school, and Colts imagined what it would be like to have a family, this family. As far as he could go with the thought it included a boy lost and lonely, being brought out of himself by the example of a man. Bowling him bouncers did no good, Damon hurled the bat into a hawthorn bush, but archery lit him up when he struck a sparrow. He showed Colts a picture of a crossbow that could be bought by mail order from a hunting magazine: it looked harmless enough.
Janelle, almost a generation younger than Colts, had little contact with Cud Langley, Damon’s father. The boy didn’t share Cud’s name. But apparently Janelle had been back together with Cud a few times and longed for a full reconciliation, in fact spoke of marriage, but she never spoke of this to Colts.
Janelle had an effect on Colts, a heat flush when he looked at her or thought of her; it would come to no good. At night he dreamed of her, spirit and flesh. There she was, the young mother with red hair and white skin, her baby’s fists in the way as Colts slid around to get a better look. He’d been on the run. His dreams were of trains, the fixed rails of destination, what couldn’t be reached expressed in the doppler shift of lamplit platforms. When he looked in from the night she stared back and he left his seat and stood in a corridor feeling beaten. Sixteen or sixty, it was just the same.
On a stinking-hot day Janelle came to the door wearing a T-shirt and undies and he was thrown by her casual impression of him as what, a capon? Women her generation sunbathed naked in backyards and swam topless in rivers. Colts’s better self had a whim to take care of her, to put an arm around her and draw her in. Parental, he told himself it might be, as he looked around and saw other men his age were grandfathers while he wallowed in shock-effect fascination. The effect on his pocket could hardly be ignored when he decided to buy the house Janelle lived in and rent it back to her for whatever she could afford. The effect on his appearance could hardly be ignored when he trimmed his hair (definitely an improvement), grew a moustache and swapped his moleskins for a pair of flared jeans, not an improvement so much as a wistful pose. Coming up her path he heard the songs of Leonard Cohen droning out from her speakers with such persistence that the mood of them leaked from his heart. ‘Suzanne Takes You Down’, ‘So Long, Marianne’, ‘One of Us Cannot Be Wrong’. Suppressing a smile at his new look, Janelle drew him to her, what did that mean, and they took a few stumbling dance-steps around the verandah boards after which Colts felt stunned. It was words and music, that was all, but he was left slain, butchered and broken open, while Janelle hardly seemed to notice what she’d done as she grabbed a mop and got on with her cleaning.
Janelle had a way of looking dismayed if not depressed, which stirred Colts’s feelings as he stood at the front gate of the plain old weatherboard house extending his goodbyes before he went up to the Five Alls to slake his thirst. The house purchase, when she learned of it, distanced her. She felt uncomfortable with it. The crossbow arrived and Colts sat at home putting it together, putting it on top of a cupboard. The moustache came off and the moleskins went back on.
Interest rates climbed that year, bank managers looked grim; and Colts needed to trade something to keep hold of the mortgage and did, getting offered money for something he owned thanks to Randolph as go-between. It was the painting: Goats.
A man wanted a Veronica Buckler, said Randolph – regarded it as a rare prize: ‘Yours is a period piece, in its own strange way.’
Well, so it is, thought Colts, experiencing sulky over-familiarity with the ’40s style that Randolph carried on about. ‘Take it away,’ he said. Damon Pattison was there to hear the summation as Colts looked at Goats for the last time.
Colts was no connoisseur when it came to styles but knew the decade for its harsh light; its hot, thin shade, through which he sometimes still stumbled, angry and dismayed, drinking from a fibrous waterbag. There he was. All prophesied. Now for his year of changes.
The buyer was Randolph’s loud friend Ted Merrington, who trawled through the ranges impressing the wizened with largesse, calling on his monkey-faced twin sons with their crane-equipped ten-tonner to haul out old tractors and whatever else they could seize from under blackberry bushes and from garbage gullies and ship to Red China. Merrington played the game of old-school tie with bullying self-interest. Randolph loved that game in the sheep-bitten hills.
In Colts’s Woodbox Gully cottage the absence of Goats, a pale rectangle on the wall, made Colts see it clearer. As soon as he pocketed the cheque he felt a door open in the sky. If he’d felt like pleasing Randolph and driving through the desert in a truck with swags and billies, as Randolph kept urging him, he didn’t now. This was a release, as if he’d come somewhere to find the vision that drew him. It was an airy openness of release, a deep-drawn clean breath.
His reply to a note from Pamela saying she’d be down on the seventeenth was unusual in that he replied at all. Their habit was that she told him and she came. Not this time, however. Never again.
There were a number of possible reactions to what she’d said when she said she knew what it was like to be truly loved, or something like it. Colts might indeed have asked her what she’d meant, but didn’t. Just felt strangled when he felt her asking for more. So he wrote to her for a change.
Blunt, humiliated, stung and goodbye were Colts’s astounding words, his expressed feelings in a Lettergram responding to her proposed seventeenth arrival – a Lettergram being a pre-stamped piece of dismal cardboard post-office stationery available at less than the price of a standard stamp as long as no extra pages were included.
Colts’s outburst was a surprise, and over and done in his few scratched lines. Lack of any earnest point, but a buried strength, a presence, was what had drawn Pamela to him in the year of changes when they began. Now she found him diminished. This blow was ungenerous of him. His letter hurt.
‘Truly loved.’ What did that mean? She’d meant that she loved him, couldn’t the old fool see it, however undeserving he might think that was. It had come out otherwise. And now this.
Now she wasn’t so sure. But that didn’t stop her crying into her pillow for what seemed like weeks, before she dried her eyes and resumed her visits to the Junction, staying down the other end of town and managing to avoid Colts just as Randolph had in a previous cycle of withdrawal and known to all. Here were two more strangers to each other in the puzzle of life.
Shakespeare in Schools arrived every September, Randolph its local patron. There was never a season like the first nor an actor as promising as Fred Donovan. Randolph ‘followed’ Donovan, keeping track of his name on Sydney playbills and architectural write-ups until he was told he was gone overseas.
‘Wonderful,’ said Randolph. ‘To the RSC?’
‘No, to New Zealand. Building mountain huts.’
Randolph suggested they see the show in its new configuration and Colts surprised him by agreeing. He was apparently prepared to brave a school hall if Damon would like to come. Violent swordplay appealed to the boy, as stage competed with film for an audience, Shakespeare being the Sam Peckinpah of the 1600s according to roneographed Teachers’ Notes placed on each chair. Colts leafed through them uncomprehendingly. Damon sat between Colts and Randolph, the latter explaining plot points in bad breath. Afterwards Randolph took Damon onto the stage to finger the gore of blue jelly where Cornwall gouged out Gloucester’s eye.
As if to prove that Colts’s intentions with Janelle were honourable he woke one morning in the arms of a woman named Sylvie. They had their own bar stools in the Five Alls where the bar dog-legged into a corner. Colts liked Sylvie’s close-set gimlet eyes and thin lips, her complaining directness over getting what she wanted. Sylvie brought out in Colts a variation of lust matched to her country shirts and skinny jeans all somewhat suggestive of Janelle. Married men never had such selfish luxury as Colts took for a bachelor’s reward with Sylvie. And get this, Pamela Slim: the word ‘bachelor’ was out of date as the result of women taking men on, relieving them of choice. Colts lay back, scratching his chest hair and ruminating on existence. Love with Pamela had never had much to do with sex, a side dish. With Sylvie it was the whole saddle of mutton.
On Christmas Day that year Colts drove down to Veronica and Buckler’s place on the Isabel Estuary, supplying farm-cured ham from a pig fattened in a compound built of corrugated iron and star pickets, erected at the far end of Alan Hooke’s house paddock on the edge of town. He took Janelle and Damon with him. They sang ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ and Damon counted all the dead animals on the road with exact arithmetic.
Janelle teased Colts frankly: ‘You and Sylvie – do you actually do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘You know, “it”.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think – uh oh.’ She laughed.
With Janelle realising that Colts might not be too old for a rumpty-pump, her manner changed. She was full of affectionate, joshing humour. She felt safer with him and leaned on his shoulder. It made no sense to Colts, except it was what he was trying to say to Janelle through his dealings with Sylvie, when he paraded them to her.
Janelle gave Colts an expensive fine-weave print shirt in an American size and boxed in cellophane. Colts crackled the packaging in his large hands, feeling tides of emotion he was unable to comprehend. Janelle advised him he was wasting his time with Sylvie, which baffled his hopes yet again.
They wore paper hats, blew whistles, spoke to Faye and Boy Dunlap by radio telephone hook-up. After the gigantic reality of childhood there was always the lesson of ordinariness to be borne on Christmas Day. Buckler was eighty-nine that year, you’d never know it. His old-time physical vigour was pouched and belted slacker, but not by much. He’d always worn his trousers above his navel like Tweedledum and his flannel slippers had cuts in the sides like fishes’ gills, to protect his bunions. Gone deaf, he shouted as if his head was in a bucket, so it was better to let him monologue his way along than get a word in. Driving the brown Bedford, stamping the clutch, he kept his arms, solar plexus and thighs strong over thousands of miles of bush-bashing every other northern dry season. Next time he’d take the Land Rover. All his old mates were dead. Next dead was the next lot: Hammond Pringle was dead, de Grey, the foreigner Abe and so on. Buckler still wore the old felt hat. He still wore the stained neckerchief against dust and sweat. He still appeared in Colts’s dreams, hung on his bones like a giant. His daytime power was long since reduced to a bunch of stories, repetitively told. For these, Colts had been thrown down and left to make his way on the earth among a bunch of rural live-alikes.
Colts went outside for a smoke and a look at the stars. From away over behind the dunes he could hear the surf thumping. He supposed Janelle saw him in Cuban heels and tight blue jeans, wearing a Stetson: so let her, he smiled. He changed into his new shirt. In April there’d be the ride in memory of Edwina Knox, and Tim Knox urging Colts to saddle up for old times’ sake. Janelle would be coming along. When Colts came back into the room he’d missed taking out pins and a cardboard collar stiffener, which made them all laugh. Janelle took them out for him.
Janelle came from the horse world at Pullingsvale where polo and polocrosse, rival codes, ruled the calendar year only just holding off from open warfare in mutual derision. As a young girl she’d been seduced to the polocrosse side from pony club with her cousins, the Frizells, sticking to polo. Cud Langley was in the campdrafting, country-and-western corner chasing calves through narrow posts with masterly disdain on ponies just a little bit undersized for his frame. Cud was national campdraft champion and attended by a succession of girl stablehands among whom Janelle had won first place after sitting on a railing fence with six others, waiting to be chosen just nine months before Damon was born.
Damon proved a willing disciple as Buckler turned the pages of the Illustrated History of the Great War, describing the firepower of dreadnoughts and the deadly exactness of sniper fire. Then it was all off to bed. Colts woke from dreamlessness to see Buckler in striped pyjamas, standing out in the kikuyu grass emptying his bladder and coughing like a loose crankshaft.
Afterwards, Colts could not sleep and turned on the reading lamp. In the sleep-out Buckler had shelves of books, papers, maps and photographs, tumbling onto the bed and out across the floor. Colts found a pamphlet, Shakespeare for Schools, with a section written by Randolph’s star, Fred Donovan. Colts frowned, he was never a reader, but read this much and fell asleep at the end.
A king went along separating himself from his kingdom, thrown up in a flood of clods of soil and tufts of grasses ripped from fields of Britain.
Lear was giving his rule away, wishing cares and business from his old age, conferring interest of territory on younger strengths in desire to crawl unburdened toward death.
He promised his first daughter, Goneril, shadowy forests and champains riched, plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meadows. His second daughter, Regan, was promised an ample third, no less in space, validity and pleasure than that conferred on Goneril. They answered beautifully to his foolishness, the pair of them rhyming doves of flattery. But when he asked his youngest, sweetest daughter, Cordelia, for her pledge of love to draw a third share more opulent than her sisters’, she baulked with nothing to say. Nothing!
Nothing would come of nothing, said Lear, and asked Cordelia to speak again. When she spoke, it was to regret her inability to heave her heart into her mouth.
For some reason, when Colts woke, a memory or the expression of a memory was what he had. Never had he heaved his heart into his mouth. He knew he loved Janelle, but she was many years his junior and the idea felt tragic and naive. He’d paid a price in being ungenerous to Pamela. She wrote, finally, and told him so: ‘How dare you,’ etc. ‘It was all going so nicely,’ etc. ‘I don’t understand,’ etc.
Shimmering off into the square of Colts’s fading dream was the emptied frame of Goats. He was anxious that Veronica not ask about it. As far as Veronica knew, Goats remained in pride of place on his walls in Woodbox Gully.
Veronica described Limestone Hills to Janelle. ‘This man, your friend, was a peerlessly lovely boy. He lived in a place where dryness pulled moisture from the soil and dust exploded in mares’ tails on white dirt roads.’ She was describing her own painting of course, her favoured colours and textures. Colts clamped his eyes shut, praying she wouldn’t name the name, Goats.
‘Do you ever go back there?’ asked Janelle. ‘To Limestone Hills?’
‘It’s in the hands of a sharefarmer,’ said Veronica. ‘Paddocks, machinery, the lot. Dunc takes his rent, except for a few fenced acres, the graveyard, under separate title.’
The both of them, for some reason, looked at Colts when Veronica said that.
Outside Colts’s childhood window, in that sweep of limestone country belched by drought, trees died in thousands in the 1940s in patterns like old worn carpet. Veronica had stitched them to canvas with rapid jabs of her brush. He’d set his face to the future, whatever it would bring.