NOW THAT COLTS HAD HIS driver’s licence suspended and a large fine to pay, with more penalties to come if he so much as climbed behind the wheel of a vehicle for the next eighteen months, Alan Hooke found himself getting out of the office dealing with clients more.
Hooke spent the whole wet afternoon with Ted Merrington walking cows and calves down narrow gullies to a set of yards and drafting them out. It was miserable weather but satisfying work for men. Angry with Colts for backsliding, Hooke saw the day coming, and soon, when Colts would be sacked. But he’d said it before – been saying it on and off for twenty-five years, and Careful Bob before him. He was reminded by everyone who knew them. Colts’s life savings were wasted, the weatherboard house in Woodbox Gully was sold, the rental house was gone, movable assets all cashed, and God only knew where the money had gone. Down the hatch, obviously. The hundred acres Colts briefly owned on Duck Creek disappeared back into the landscape. Colts lived in a rented ruin Hooke found for him in a thistly paddock on the town creek. Hooke reflected that if he put him off he’d still look after him. That was a proven habit. The cost to his pocket would hardly exceed the cost to his feelings so far.
Hooke, a man surrounded by women – wife, daughters, sisters, mother, aunts – needed male friendships to balance women’s utter convictions of how life should be lived. A vestige of this was Colts turning up for work each day with smiling, trembly-handed concentration, wafting an air of shamed cunning, blocking Hooke’s every attempt to understand him with stubborn pretence that nothing was wrong.
Hooke and Merrington had opposite styles of doing the required job – Hooke being a quiet, effective prodder whereas Merrington swore and whacked animals’ rumps with a length of plastic pipe to get them moving. If a beast proved stubborn, craning its neck, red-eyed across a bony shoulder, Merrington took it personally while Hooke whistled and waited.
Rain slanted from the south and ran over their hat brims and down their noses to their chins. Alan Hooke was a lean, light-complexioned man with a narrow, intelligent face and a flattened nose from boxing. In his youth he’d won the regional light heavyweight belt and few ever forgot that.
Merrington was a big, jokey sort of a man, used to getting his own way, and when he didn’t, enforcing it. He was physically, naturally strong, but a bit slabbily overweight with a plum-coloured complexion, and gave his opinions freely. He was known to Hooke, and now Hooke was getting to know him better. Merrington had located this chunk of land while scouring the landscape for scrap steel with his sons and was in the business of turning himself into one of the types he’d bought from – a squatter of the Upper Isabel persuasion, semi-retired while his sons took over the running of the firm and dealing with scrap iron-hungry China.
When a cow lurched heavily through the wrong gate, banging it sideways, splintering a panel, Merrington squatted in a puddle and belted mud with his polypipe, swearing in a rhythm of frustration and sending splats of wet manure all over himself.
Alan Hooke had never quite seen that kind of thing before.
When they got the cows away Merrington switched in the middle of a rant and turned to Hooke, raising a wild eyebrow: ‘Shall we take horses next time? Do you ride?’
No answer needed to that. Hooke was raised in dealing stock for a family living, scouring the gullies of the Dividing Range from early youth with a hard-headed father on an irascible fat-bellied pony kept for the muster. There didn’t seem much point in taking horses when a walk along a ridge-top with a cattle dog was effective. But if Merrington wanted some galloping fun he’d oblige.
Why Merrington had this effect on him Hooke couldn’t say. The divorce from Colts was part of the explanation. The man was well past fifty but like a spoiled child. It was the charm of the cheeky kid making demands, Hooke supposed – you might want to kick them but they made you grin, made you feel you could get them what nobody else could. Maybe that was the key to Merrington’s success in scrap, whittling down offers to the point of being begged to take it.
Merrington looked for trouble on the simplest pretext.
‘You don’t always have to please me, Alan.’
‘I like to try.’
‘I don’t have to please you, though.’ Merrington threw a piratical grin. ‘Use your agent as a floor mop, as the old saying goes.’
Hooke enjoyed the banter, the game of words. Merrington brought matters chin to chin and then swerved away with opposite meanings. So many of Hooke’s clients were hard-dealing men with no imagination to be otherwise. Judge Frederick Knox, who’d sold Merrington his house and land, was an example. Merrington’s fancy, it appeared, was to be in the Knox class. Tussock barons, Hooke’s father had called them, with never as much cash as acres since the 1950s but with resources to answer higher callings by virtue of being born to rule.
Six months before, on auction day (Hooke wielding the hammer), Merrington won the homestead block excised from a larger spread. It offered barely a basic living in the chewed-out hills, but the riverbank house was a famous pile, a Professor Leslie Wilkinson design from 1923, and Merrington bragged the acreage would yield an impressive costs-to-income potential through his adroitness in beating the arse off a Knox.
Except Merrington was a mere trier in the poverty stakes, really – Hooke’s rare contact with an owner who wasn’t an authentic hard case but wanted to be seen as one. The money he’d paid for plant and equipment after the auction was way above what anyone else in the district wanted to give. It reversed a trend of gentlemanly conduct when Merrington wrote a cheque without much haggling. It was always Hooke’s precaution, Dunn and Bradstreet-wise, to bite silver back to the source. This time no need for that – Merrington Metals was solid – but Hooke’s question was why Merrington had this almost wheedling need to be seen as someone he wasn’t. It turned out that Merrington had something to hide. Hooke learned he was the son of the madam, Betty Truegood, who made a fortune during the Second World War by converting terrace houses at the back of Victoria Street, Potts Point, into flashy brothels for American servicemen. A ringleted eight-year-old boy, Edward Truegood, being debouched from a limousine at the gates of Cranbrook School was photographed in Pix magazine in 1950: this was this same florid Ted Merrington now transplanted to the Upper Isabel.
Merrington wore a pair of stiff leather leggings found in a shed. Draped around his shoulders was an oilskin cape left hanging on a peg since the 1940s. He brought to mind a squatter from the Joliffe cartoons in Pix – a comical geezer with galahs in the corn and a Bugatti in the woolshed. Hooke calculated bringing Merrington up to date from the workwear side of the agency. He felt warm about his ironical client in the cold rain, catching a glint in Merrington’s eye that seemed to suggest Merrington reading Hooke’s thoughts and finding them tartly agreeable. They might even become friends. Hooke had reached a stage of life of wanting more zest from his usual cronies, denizens of the Apex Club and the Five Alls Hotel Galloping Wombats Polocrosse Squad, with Merrington a stiff breeze battering up from where housing estates crowded the boundaries of his scrap-metal yard and former farm acres.
‘That’s the way, Ted,’ said Hooke, with the calves jammed black and glistening in the race, smelling of panic. ‘You’ve got them sitting pretty.’
Merrington accepted the tribute with a twisted smile.
‘You’re limping,’ Hooke observed.
‘It’s from a rodeo fall years ago.’
‘No kidding?’
Merrington gave a toss of the head: ‘I went jackarooing up Wanaaring way, in the school hols. Stayed with the Jacky Whites, entered the bullock ride as a dare. I was a stupid young booger and now the sciatica stabs like a knife. Our generation needed a war but didn’t get it – cracked ribs and a fractured pelvis, they’re my battle scars while your old man got his medals at Tobruk, I understand.’
‘We had Vietnam,’ countered Hooke.
‘You believe so?’ Merrington’s neck elongated and his head wove like a alarmed snake’s, arrested in exaggerated surprise. ‘You were in that?’ He steadied and stared hard. It was possible that Merrington’s slum-terrace inheritance was revived for the R and R traffic of the 1960s and ’70s and Merrington a beneficiary.
‘I was in the lottery but my number never came up,’ said Hooke.
‘Would you have gone if it had?’
Hooke barely understood the question. Of course he would have gone. That was the deal offered, just as it was when Careful Bob went to North Africa to fight the Eyeties and then to Ambon against the Nips. Only later he might have seen things differently.
‘I was a tad too old for that game of marbles,’ said Merrington, giving his polypipe a flick on the rails to clear it of muck. ‘So I wasn’t given the privilege to serve.’
An almost sneer accompanied the words, again leaving Hooke wondering what Merrington meant. That Hooke should have enlisted anyway? That he was, on the contrary, wrong to have even taken his chances?
A phone call came. Merrington’s wife, Dominique, relayed information from under an umbrella at the side garden gate. The semitrailer Hooke promised was delayed past dark.
Merrington said, ‘Well!’ and shot an intense glare at the agent.
Hooke said, ‘Easy does it,’ and reminded him that nine calves were not a full semi load, and the driver was doing the rounds of the district, so might he just be patient like everyone else? Thus reprimanded Merrington became almost timid and asked Hooke down to the house.
With double whiskies replenished twice over they awaited the semi. It arrived past seven in the sodden winter dark. Half sloshed by then they loaded the stock by headlights, the driver using an electric prod and scampering terrified calves up the race in the rain. Merrington took the prod and tried it, liking the feel. ‘This is more humane than people make out,’ he said, jolting a poor animal more than was warranted. Then with a reckless leer he reached around behind his back and gave himself a wallop of volts in the left rear buttock.
‘Whoa baby! Order me one in the morning!’ he yelled.
‘Done.’
They took more drinks afterwards to re-warm their saturated bones. Dominique Merrington attentively plied them with potage velouté aux champignons and home-baked baps as they sat at the kitchen table, telling Hooke he must bring his wife next time. Hooke then rang Liz to explain his lateness and heard the arch humour in her voice, the note of interested surprise over who was getting him plastered. ‘Ted came to the school on Careers’ Day,’ she said, ‘with a stack of slides, and talked to Year Twelve about import–export. They thought he was funny.’
‘As in?’ said Hooke guardedly.
‘Ha-ha. They all want to make their fortunes now selling junk to China.’
‘You’ve met my Lizzie, then,’ said Hooke when he came off the phone.
Merrington shot Hooke an empty glance, grinding his bottom jaw sideways as if about to spit.
‘Have I?’
‘She’s a teacher.’
‘Oh, delightful. The little English one with plaits?’
‘Yes, she’s a Pom,’ acknowledged Hooke.
‘We liked her, didn’t we, Dom?’
Merrington’s wife turned from the stove ready to agree with him, but then catching herself and laughing and putting a finger to her chin, and saying, ‘No-ooh,’ that she hadn’t actually met Liz yet.
The two men moved into the expansive living room with dogs on the rugs and a fire of red gum in the grate. Hooke talked about his children – his own twin daughters by his first marriage and Lizzie’s two boys, Matt and Johnny, by hers. The twins lived with their mother, Barbara, in Sydney, in their second last year at St Catherine’s, and visited their home town irregularly. It broke Hooke’s heart missing them through their growing years, and now when they came it was only for a few days at a time because there was too much else going on for them in the ’smoke.
‘How old are the girls?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘I understand that age,’ said Merrington in a tone that implied, mysteriously, that Hooke didn’t. ‘They should come and visit some time.’
‘Visit?’
‘Look around.’
Merrington gestured about the room, indicating the rooms branching from rooms, to the boot room, the billiard room, the boiler room, to the north and south wings, the attic staircase, the attic rooms, the architectural legend of the Knox House by Leslie Wilkinson on the fabled Isabel. Dozens of paintings hung in the semi-gloom from the ceiling down to the backs of sideboards and couches, ornate frames, historical scenes of sailing ships and artic inlets, willow-lined creeks and standing cattle, blocky abstract squares, carnival clowns and botanical illustrations all mixed in together. The whole thing would mean little to the girls but the offer felt friendly.
‘This one’s called Springtime,’ said Merrington.
Above the fireplace a painting of female figures gave an impression of half-circles overlapping. Merrington stood beside it with a look of shy cunning, inviting a response. There were small floating leaves like mini-bikinis covering the obvious bits. Hooke peered close and recognised the signature.
‘I’ll be blowed,’ he said.
‘Yes, you’ve found me out, Al, I don’t just deal in rubbish, I dabble with the brush.’
He seemed genuinely humbled by the admission, by the revelation of a side of himself that he might possibly disdain revealing, the little ringleted boy with an artistic blush.
Dominique took Merrington’s arm and looked at him admiringly. She was French, angular and graceful, and as tall as he was. ‘We met in a galleree,’ she said, ‘by good chance. I had no idea who he was, rough-and-ready he wandered in from the demolition site next door. After that, well . . .’
She shrugged. He leered.
Hooke liked her. She was wife number three. New life, new wife, new spread, new friendships – it was a pattern in country purchases, newly emerging, a counter to drought-shrinkage.
‘I never know what to make of art,’ said Hooke, looking around at the pictures, all by known names, he supposed, and worth plenty. ‘But I like Norman Lindsay,’ he said, recognising a nude with plenty of chest.
He was unable to square the wispiness of the one over the fireplace with the bluff man who’d produced it. ‘Around Liz and the twins it’s a different story, they’d have lots to say.’
‘They could sit for me.’
‘Sit?’
Merrington made a scribbling motion with his hand on an invisible easel. ‘Twins pay double,’ he said, in a bargaining tone.
Hooke said, ‘For doing nothing?’
‘He’s a lightning croquis,’ said Dominique. ‘A fast worker.’
She meant sketcher. The double meaning escaped her. Merrington caught Hooke’s eye.
‘There would be no funny stuff,’ he pouted, ‘I can assure you of that’ – making Hooke feel he’d had an unworthy thought, when really he was just giving the man his due, reflecting warmly, through a haze of whisky and wine, how there were more ways of skinning a cat than were dreamed up in his little corner.
‘Think of it this way,’ said Merrington. ‘Get the beast right and you never have to feed it or shift it around or call the vet when it gets the staggers.’
‘Agreed,’ said Hooke.
‘Doddery means dollars in the art game.’
‘Ha, ha, I’m with you,’ said Hooke.
He stood, yawned, stretched, patted the dogs and said he’d better be going. The thought of Lizzie and the life they had was a magnet in the night – her warm toes pulling him over to her side of the bed when he came in, and the way they slept in each other’s arms until the early rooster crowed and they woke holding hands as trustingly as children.
‘It’s still early,’ taunted Merrington. ‘She’s got you by the short and curlies.’
‘Maybe so.’ Hooke grinned.
‘Dear me, Edooward,’ chided Dominique, joining the farewells at the door, ‘I imagine Alung doesn’t have the luxury of sleeping in like you do, dormir comme un loir.’
Feeling blindly towards his car, Hooke heard Merrington’s voice answering her back. It seemed the new wife was being paid out for verbal slips. But why shouldn’t a man sleep late if he could? Give Hooke the chance, he told himself, he’d sleep past noon every break he got. Merrington, thought Hooke, was lucky in not having to show up at daylight at yet another set of frosty yards, running through the same whiskery old palaver every day of his life for the sake of the national debt and carrying staff members effectively on the sorry list.
Although not every day really. For there were times mid-month or early in the week previous to cattle sales’ Fridays when Alan Hooke’s phone fell silent for up to an hour and the winter sunshine poured across the oiled boards of the agency. Then Hooke went around wiping dust from old photographs and chasing blowflies with a ruler. Then he gave the indispensable Jenny Garlick the morning off to visit her mother in the elderlies’ wing of the district hospital; and sent Henry Tuck on hourly rates delivering hardware around town from the back of the old Bedford while Colts sidled off at noon to the Five Alls and didn’t come back.
Then Hooke was ready for visitors to his alcove under the stairs, the green-stained electric kettle ready on the boil, instant coffee spooned from a jar and a packet of Chocolate Wheatens ripped open and available to anyone who wanted to grab. And intermittently in they came and grabbed – old graziers on their stick-assisted rounds, former loyal clients of Hooke & Hooke, bygone strong men of the Isabel diminished in their bones and down from their outlying acres and wind-rattled pioneer homesteads for good. For the betterment of their old age, and the pleasure of their wives, they’d bought brick-veneer bungalows in town with decent plumbing and cement driveways painted green. Randolph Knox, the odd man out in this sequence, had restored his stone cottage with a walled rose garden, justly famed.
‘Up at the Fives,’ thumbed Hooke when Randolph came in looking for Colts like an old tortoise wrinkly-necked escaped from his shell.
Hooke knew what was coming when the oldsters nudged him in the ribs and told him another one about Careful Bob, and the one time Careful Bob had got the better of them, the cunning old rat of Tobruk. Except Hooke knew it wasn’t just the one time because his father had taken the long view always.
The best example of this was the Bullock Run. It started with those thousand acres bought from the Homegrove Knoxes in the late 1940s. Along the rim of the Dividing Range were more parcels of land Bob had bought for barely the cost of a packet of fags in the ’50s and ’60s at mortgagees’ auctions, deceased estate clearances and the like. Once a scattered mosaic intersected by logging tracks, by the ’70s the paddocks passed to Hooke amalgamated whole. Now with the millennium looming they were a treasure.
The Bullock Run, four thousand acres of mountain fastness, responded to years of aerial supering and low stocking rates, whereas on Hooke’s home block, his rocky three hundred acres just out of town (the house within sightline of St Aidan’s belltower) Hooke ran fine wool merinos until they nibbled the ground almost bare, a choice little flock biding time and building up numbers among the wild turnip and saffron thistle. Hooke guarded their increase from marauding town dogs with a policy of once warned, never reminded. The sheep would remain a mere sideline until wool improved and Hollywood Boy III paid his way handsomely serving ewes. Meantime on the Bullock Run a herd of Black Angus covered the twins’ maintenance and education expenses and left change for a red MGB – or some such whim of nature – that Hooke planned wheeling in for Liz’s fortieth birthday surprise.
Then there was the time, the old men cackled, competing for Hooke’s attention, when Alan was too young to remember, so they said, when Careful Bob had driven warily around the corner near the Catholic church (back postwar when the roads in town were still rough dirt) and the passenger door flipped open and infant Alan rolled out on the gravel.
‘You wouldn’t remember. You sat there like a little king directing the traffic, covered in dust.’
‘Did I just.’ Hooke smiled.
‘Yeah, till Bob in the Saloon Bar of the Five Alls bought you a raspberry syrup and looked around wonderin’ where you was.’
So he had the old men. But since that evening with Ted Merrington, Hooke came back to a thought – opening the door to the street and advancing his indefinable understanding towards that peppery man. It was what he wanted, and why this should be so Hooke wondered. There had been no sighting of Merrington since the night of the big headache when Hooke had driven home seeing double all the way. At the end of that week the monthly statements had gone out as usual, including Merrington’s with a few necessary adjustments.
One day it snowed down to the thousand-metre contour line. Colts stayed home with pleurisy and Hooke went round and mixed him a whisky and lemon. In a distant gap of steely-grey clouds Hooke saw the Bullock Run dappled through the state forest. He imagined the black cattle with snow striping their spines and lacing their sturdy haunches. Get me up there, he vowed.
Suddenly there was Merrington, haggard and huddled in houndstooth sportscoat and Jaeger scarf, crossing windswept, deserted, inhumanly bitter-cold Gograndli Street and meeting Hooke face to face.
‘Hello, bud,’ he wheezed through his teeth.
‘Ted, good to see you.’
Merrington’s tongue, white as limewash, rattled as he shaped his words. Hooke had the feeling he’d forgotten his name, though not his function, as he grabbed him by the jumper and drew him close.
‘Where’s my cattle prod?’
‘Wasn’t that a joke?’ said Hooke, grinning because Merrington had that effect on him, and he was glad.
‘That says a lot.’
‘Ted, I’ll get you one.’
Merrington bit again: ‘The statement you sent me was a fine piece of work. My wonderful price for calves wasn’t so great after you cut it to ribbons with your costs and deductions and whatever else you chose to whittle it down with.’
‘Just trying to help you, Ted.’
There’d been a load of hardwood planks, Hooke reminded his client, six twenty-kilo bags of Lucky Dog and a galvanised steel wheelbarrow with a pneumatic tyre, top of the range, for which Merrington had overlooked paying since auction day and which Hooke, after the three-month allowance for terms ran out, had taken care of, as Careful Bob used to say, till now.
‘Sharp,’ said Merrington, without the trace of a grin.
‘I don’t like being touched, Ted.’
Best to make that clear to a man who was hard as they came. Whose sons, it was said, did his bidding or else.
Merrington rocked back on his heels and gave a small uncertain laugh. There came again that almost apologetic appeal in the collapsed body language – the retreat into meekness Hooke remembered after reprimanding him in the yards.
It needed to be said, but made the friendly side of Alan Hooke feel sick and sorry. ‘Come over to the shop for a cuppa?’
‘The legendary old men’s club.’
‘Is that what they call it?’
‘Oh, crafty. As if there’s something you don’t know. It was the first thing I heard when I came onto the Isabel. That you weren’t anybody till you’d got pissed with Colts and been tested by Hooke.’
‘Tested?’
‘My flaming oath.’
A car went past, separating them, and when Hooke stepped back onto the road he saw Merrington making his way uphill towards the post office, waving farewell as if nothing uneasy had passed between them, as if soon enough – although not today – he would drop in for that hot drink and friendly yarn.
A fact Hooke knew about people who headed up the hill as if to the post office was that up there, just over the rise, Kinloch United Sandison & Ball pitched for business, no matter how small it was. Could be that Merrington was already taking trade to Kinloch the Farmer’s Friend, as the franchiser, new to town, called himself, fitting out the staff in akubras and issuing monogrammed cotton shirts and moleskin trousers to both sexes.
Liz said there must be only one farmer using that lot because of where they put the apostrophe. Hooke liked her loyalty, but noticed his cashflow wobble a bit through the year.
Hooke walked down through the backroom storage shelves and went to the dim windows facing out into the lane. There he coiled cobwebs with his finger and gazed up into the hills at the far end of town. He knew every twist of track and crooked boundary line disputed and argued over since Careful Bob first piggybacked him through the kangaroo grass and showed him the place. A shaft of sunlight passed along the range and the snow showers melted from the far-distant slopes almost as he watched. In the good years of the decade now ending, when snow happened there was constantly the smell of spring in the air, rich and clean, well-watered. Not far off was the excitement of a good flush of feed translating itself into people’s wellbeing, interest-only loans, extensions of credit. The depressive cycles of drought were peaked in manic forgetfulness.
There were no cattle prods in stock but Hooke ordered one by express post. As soon as it arrived he threw it on the passenger seat of the Fairlane and drove the fifty minutes to Merrington’s Burnside. Walled ivy and attic window crenellations gave the place a lonely touch, as if it could never be brought to life and never had been. Flagstones on the long rose walk echoed in the morning stillness. Nobody was home. Even the dogs were gone. A small flush of green in the driveway wheeltracks showed there’d been nobody home for possibly a week.
When Hooke drove around the back of the house to check the sheds a bunch of cows galloped along the fenceline towards him, just that little bit hungry and wanting a bale of hay. There was hay in the shed though, and Hooke wondered where Merrington had bought it, who he’d bought it from. Seventeen cows meant that Merrington had bought an extra five from somewhere, and paid good money, too, because they weren’t cheap anywhere. They hadn’t come through Hooke & Hooke, and that thought justified Hooke’s taking liberties to find out more.
So with the parcel tucked under his arm he walked down the side of the house looking for a place to leave it, tried the back door, and entered the kitchen with its pots and pans hanging from the ceiling and cricket-pitch length Aga stove and deep square stone washing-up tubs. It was not how Hooke usually did business – donating a long drive to one client alone – unless the favour owed was considerable, and in this case the favour was hardly more than a niggle raised to vague importance. Nor was it like Alan Hooke to go walking through an empty house uninvited. But on he went, nose weaving like a ferret’s.
Entering the next room on from the kitchen, a sunroom with southern light, he was drawn to the distinct aroma of turps and oils. The door gave a groan on its hinges. So this was Merrington’s retreat, where he dabbled and daubed. A row of cobwebbed skylights revealed racing clouds. An unfinished canvas, perhaps of tree branches, or of skeletonised fingers, or was it bare ribs – it was – stood in the corner. Hooke closed the door on the privacy of what he had seen, a naked someone, still arguing with himself for his boldness. ‘He owes me for the drive,’ the calculating part of Hooke rationalised, always a ledger there in the back of the mind. But another thought was that Liz wouldn’t stand for being excluded from anything he saw, if it was going to be interesting. The living room walls crammed with those framed oils had Liz wanting to look over the Merringtons’ collection in full, the other rooms boasted about and the crates awaiting cracking open from storage. Hooke wouldn’t want her excluded, either, as that was a principle of life, and so in his head a small competitive argument with Merrington began. Who was the better man?
Passing another door, he looked in, he found Goats.
So here was the answer to a question from a while back – as to where that painting had gone, leaving the pale square on Colts’s shabby wall, and who’d had the money to pay for it. In the end, Hooke smiled, Hooke always found out. He had Colts. Now he had Merrington. Or almost.
That question was certainly in the air with Merrington – ‘to be tested by Hooke’ – and had been since the auction, when Merrington bid up to prove his worth and overpriced himself against the district norms. Tracing it back, Hooke identified the question separating Merrington out from his other clients – the source of attraction. Merrington didn’t have to be like other people if he didn’t want to be. It wasn’t the evident wealth that gave him the freedom, though maybe the possible source of it, way back, in brothel earnings, helped cut an edge. Anything bad that could be said about him had been said all his life since he was a boy in ringlets wearing a private school blazer and attracting the gutter press.
By contrast Hooke spent his entire life matching himself to others’ needs up to a finely judged pitch of acceptance. Who was more impartial than the auctioneer tenor-throating animals and merchandise to their inherent market worth? He got through by cultivating an air of absolute equality, hard won.
Merrington was more than he seemed, Hooke already knew that. His painting room was more than Merrington, pointing to a truth Hooke had always known in the blustery world around him, but hadn’t ever quite focused on to see so brilliantly. For Alan Hooke was at a point in life when he wanted not just to have passed through the world but to have whatever was true in the world passed through him.
There was always that seeking part of Hooke, wanting that little bit more. He felt a nibble of it now, its promise. It gave him pluck in the amateur ring, when younger, and was there in his singing when he was a bit older, one of Rev. Vince Powell’s revivalist choristers, in a longing for spiritual moments uncorrupted by second thoughts. But what, Hooke asked himself, was truly, widely and generously amazing about him at all? He was in the groove as successor to Careful Bob down the years. That defined him locally, and still did. That Liz found him remarkable, a cause for praise, was the definition of her loving him. What about the rest?
Something was left over for Hooke as a man that he was faced dealing with as a man. It rose into his understanding as a drive to line up with sex and the providing instinct. Nothing more than that, but it seemed more elevated and he could only express it as a question: where was the room equivalent to Merrington’s where Hooke himself kept a few reflections of his aspiring self, ready for show? If a man didn’t have one, he surely needed one. The glimpse of Goats told him that. Colts was a man whose whole life had shrunk down from something too amazing for him to handle. Hooke wasn’t going to have it that way for himself.
Up on the mountain was the best fattening country Careful Bob had ever stumbled across, those crafted, exemplary paddocks surrounded by untouched forest, tall timber shedding long clattering strips of bark, the acreage that the sheep-grazing Knoxes hadn’t valued, to Randolph Knox’s bitter regret. Could be those acres were Hooke’s amazing room, ceiling open to the sky, walls wide.
Hooke kept the wonders of the Bullock Run in the family as a rule. It was his workaday mental refuge, the place he went at weekends and on long summer evenings when the day’s dealing was done – just twenty minutes’ drive from the agency door to the locked gate. He used to go up with Colts, but no longer. Now he decided to ask Merrington up there.
Let him see something wild after a man’s heart, Hooke resolved. Let them make a full day of it as he used to, with Colts. He would bring Liz’s boys, Matt and Johnny, who followed his every move; they would ride farm bikes while Hooke and Merrington took to the ridges on horseback, and Liz and Dominique, that graceful Burgundian, spread a picnic lunch on the creekbank near the waterfall. If the arrangement fell at the right time the twins might come, should their Sydney social diaries permit, a bonus for Hooke’s feelings and a chance for Merrington to meet them and even possibly for them to decide about the sitting he’d offered, twins paying double.
That year was a hectic one in Hooke and Liz’s life. Liz carried a full teaching load with extra marking at night. Hooke ranged wide looking for stock, embarking on long drives and conducting his life via car phone out to the Riverina and north to the Hunter, skirting Sydney where on the horizon construction cranes wavered like long-legged mosquitoes as the city was made over for the Olympics. Several times passing he called his daughters to arrange a coffee or a Chinese meal, but it rarely worked out.
Hooke’s was an old problem: offering clients the best-priced animals while securing top dollar when they moved through to the selling end, which, livestock being what it was, came in the same market moment. ‘Hooke A Winner’ was the slogan current since Careful Bob was a boy in shorts, with a logo of Hooke in trout-fishing waders landing a sheep – but still only as good as the most recent sale. Wool, by comparison, was in a trough and so Hooke had the leisure to acquire, for the two or three concerns that cared enough to try, a line of fine wool breeders challenging his own in readiness for when the industry looked up. Colts’s sheepclassing reputation, formerly a Hooke & Hooke cachet, had fallen off. Hooke stood ready to drive Colts around and use his eye from the passenger seat without needing to roll down the window, if need be, to revive and resuscitate the one-lunged man from his drowning breath.
Almost when the details seemed too hard to arrange the twins phoned to set a date mid-term for their seventeenth birthday dinner ‘at home’, as Hooke liked to say – except the farmhouse on the town boundary of Isabel Junction where they’d started their lives had long since ceased being their centre. Once they’d ridden small bicycles with ribbons flying from the handlegrips past the hayshed and out into the ordinary backstreets leading down to the primary school. Hooke had an enduring image of them wobbling all over the road as he drove slowly behind them, making sure they were safe.
Now when they phoned there was the same feeling of protectiveness but he felt wrong-footed, intrusive: ‘Why not come Friday evening and go back Sunday night?’
Objecting, they said they would rather travel on the train, arriving early Saturday afternoon and returning late the next morning.
‘I don’t see the point of such a short stay,’ Hooke insisted. ‘Less than twenty-four hours!’
He couldn’t keep the edge of complaint from his voice, making him seem all obstinate fatherhood to his daughters, whereas to others, including Liz, nothing impossible was his motto and geniality plus his reputation.
‘Dad, can we do it our way for once?’
Hooke handed the phone to Liz feeling that they always did.
Hooke’s definition of being a man in a family of women was containment of feeling while the women expressed theirs every way they could. They seemed to have extra lines open to each other while the men’s emotional exchange barely connected. Maybe Hooke wanted it that way, liked it better, except sometimes it bothered him, and when it did it seemed more important than anything.
Liz learned how the twins were sacrificing a Saturday night party with their Sydney friends, for which a Friday night party was to be substituted. So a Saturday arrival it would be, no choice.
‘You sympathised with them,’ said Hooke, as she put the phone down.
‘I was young once.’
‘So was I, but I paid my dues.’
‘Alan, your mother told me you were abominable – never at home, driving hundreds of miles to parties and dances and leaving her dangling when she longed to know who you were interested in.’
‘Not at sixteen, seventeen. I was a lot older. Besides, it’s their birthday, I’m their father,’ said Hooke flatly.
‘You don’t understand a thing,’ she assured him. ‘Seventeen is older than it was. Darling, they love you to bits, you’re the anchor in their lives.’
Except when he up-anchored that once, he thought, creating uncertainty in their lives of which they might never know the end.
Hooke stood on the platform, his heart full. His daughters stepped from the train – freckle-faced Abbey with a head of flossy red hair wound up in a bandana; Tina with short blonde spiky ends (whereas last time Abbey was blonde and Tina red).
After kissing him they turned to Liz, hugging her to the count of ten. ‘No other luggage?’ he said as they shouldered their backpacks. They had large paper bags but wouldn’t let him take even them. He knew of course how skilled they were at packing minimal luggage after a childhood of shuttle domesticity. They skipped ahead arm-linked with Liz, leaving Hooke with the familiar emotion of wanting more than they could give. In the car he drove with a tolerant half-smile, just holding the wheel and being of service.
‘Where’s Kingsley?’ they said, looking up and down Gograndli Street. There were times in the past when he’d been there to greet them, Uncle Kings, close as family.
Hooke said nothing.
‘Oh, I get it,’ said Tina. ‘He’s back on the slops, he’s been frozen out.’
At the house Matt and Johnny came running to the car and dragged the girls to the dog kennels to muss the border collie’s coat, then to the basketball hoop clamped to the hayshed where the boys shot baskets to the girls’ applause until called for afternoon tea. On the verandah Hooke asked them about school marks and they said they’d already told him, but he couldn’t remember being told, so they patiently spelt it out.
‘Tell them how they look,’ whispered Liz.
‘Ah, by the way,’ he fidgeted with his teaspoon, ‘you girls look sensational.’ He smiled the easy, loafing smile his clients liked.
‘Do you think so, Dad? Really?’
‘Yes, smashin’,’ he confirmed, appropriating one of Liz’s North Londonisms.
They were pleased.
Then they were back with Liz, the three of them flinging dresses on beds and pooling jewellery. Hooke went to swab the concrete floor of the ram shed and waited for them to come over. As the sun sank lower he calculated that if they rushed they had time to reach the Bullock Run for a dose of country feel before they scrubbed up for the restaurant. When he went back to the house and put the question to Liz she said she’d never heard anything so absurd in all her life. The girls were in the bathroom with steam coming out from under the door in volcanic folds.
At dinner at the Pizza Heaven they announced, ‘No speeches!’
And this left Hooke with a lump in his throat because he wanted to say something tipsily profound over the remains of the garlic bread and a demolished Mexican Special. What was it again?
‘I’ve always been glad I had daughters because sons might clock me and run me down on their motorbikes.’
Matt and Johnny with their wet, slicked-back hair and spotted bow ties gave him the grin.
‘Definitely a speech,’ groaned Abbey.
‘So we’re less of a threat,’ said Tina with a martial-arts scowl, ‘because we’re weak?’
‘You don’t understand. I always had the fantasy of a togetherness thing. That we’d go to concerts in Milan or sample vineyards in, ah, Burgundy. You’d link arms with me like you do with Liz – heads would turn and people would say, “sacre bleu, they’re incredible jeune filles, and they’re his daughters”.’
‘Name the day,’ said Tina with a downward lilt to her voice. Everyone knew that Hooke was hard to uproot from his working life, his typical holiday being an expenses-paid trip around New Zealand glaciers as a reward for selling drenches.
‘Look,’ said Hooke, producing two felt-covered jewellery cases from his jacket pocket and shuffling them like a conjurer. ‘Whose is which?’
It was an old birthday routine. Whichever they received, gold wrist bracelet or silver ankle bracelet, they would swap perpetually, everything interchangeable in their lives; their friendship with each other, Hooke felt, a safety net they had when he wasn’t around. Once he’d tried to say this to them and hadn’t been understood – or only too fully understood, he didn’t quite know. If you offered perceptions and got a prickly response, was the message through?
They came around the table, hugged and kissed him, and smiled conspiratorially at Liz because they knew she’d had a hand in pushing him to get what they wanted and in steering him to the jewellery store.
Hooke had them now. But there was still a gap. Their twinship, their life in the city with their mother – an intimacy sealed from Hooke – their girls’ web of secrets, their casting of him as cranky and contradictory when he often was not, all this left him feeling excluded as a matter of course, even unloved at bedrock when he considered how much he gave and how little flowed back of what he wanted, and would be only too simple to give.
But what difference did it make really? He loved them. He underwrote their lives without question, and always would. If there was ever a mortal threat to them he would stand before them, sword and shield warding off danger. Frankly he would die for them, though with a lament on his lips: Farewell dear Lizzie, my love, I must leave thee now.
‘Dad, you’re drunk!’
‘What did I say?’
‘You were humming some old “choral” item or other.’
Liz squeezed his hand under the table.
Hooke ordered another bottle of red and watched it go straight into three out-thrust tumblers and so went for another. At the bar it was one friendly drunk after another wanting a part of him. Colts was there in the payment line, swaying on his feet, and Hooke stood blocking him from seeing that the girls were home. Colts had a strand of cheesy onion stuck on his lip and promised through pungent breath he’d be at the agency at seven Monday morning to rake out the yard. ‘You’d better be,’ said Hooke, returning to the table to find the next round of pizzas arrived and everyone tucking in.
‘What a strange, jokey, great big bear of a man,’ said Abbey, looking back over her shoulder. Hooke for a moment thought she meant Colts, their childhood’s tall Uncle Kings, and was shamed.
But it was Ted Merrington disappearing through the flywire door into the dark street with Dominique elegantly blowing kisses a few paces behind him.
‘As if it was our fault there weren’t any tables,’ said Tina.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your friend did a routine for us,’ said Liz. ‘The disgruntled pop-eyed blimp who doesn’t get what he wants but charms the children. I thought his wife looked embarrassed. She gave me a rather sweet desperation smile.’
‘Look what he did,’ said Abbey, flourishing a paper napkin holding a lightning sketch in black biro of a nest of hair and two bright eyes over a strong small chin.
‘She called it croquis, la foudre.’
‘He made me prettier than I am.’
‘You are pretty,’ said Hooke.
‘Oh, he perked up when he saw these two,’ said Liz.
‘He invited us for dinner,’ said Tina.
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow night if we want to come.’
They stared Hooke down and watched his discomfited surprise.
‘You’d cancel your train for that?’
‘Would we?’ The girls consulted, then looked across at Hooke, holding the moment teasingly.
‘Your father’s been wangling that invite for months,’ said Liz.
‘Hardly,’ said Hooke.
It amused her, Liz said, that Hooke went on advancing his sought-after friendship while the friendship itself, as far as she could tell, existed mostly in Hooke’s imagination. But she was encouraged having laid eyes on madame.
Hooke told them about his plans for a full day out on the Bullock Run.
‘Oh, that Bullock Run,’ said Abbey, raising her eyes to the ceiling.
Liz turned to the girls. ‘When your dad and I first met he took me there paddock by paddock over time. Then we came at last to the old mustering hut. That was where I loved my new country and your Alan Hooke in the same breath.’ She leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder. ‘The Bullock Run symbolises the life we made from our broken halves. The hut showed what we could do together. Once it was all bits and pieces. We nailed up board and batten, re-floored it in native pine, and installed the iron stove and unrolled the Egyptian-pattern rug.’
‘That Bullock Run,’ groaned Abbey to her sister, ‘was where I lost my thongs, remember? The iridescent ones with the electric daisies?’
‘Have you got proper toilet facilities yet, Dad?’ said Tina. ‘Or is it still the mattock and the Sorbent roll?’
‘I’m not saying we’d camp out.’
‘I can see that Mr Merrington squatting on his haunches,’ said Abbey, ‘being jabbed by a prickle.’
‘Do I cancel the idea?’
‘Well, darling, I’m for it,’ said Liz, before adding, ‘You should wait until they have us up there to Burnside as promised. Then we can ask them back.’
*
Hooke relished Sundays, the one day of the week when he slept past five and the phone didn’t start ringing at daylight. There was a clattering in the kitchen, and a lot of hushed whispering, so he pulled a pillow over his ears and went back to dreaming. When he reached across for Lizzie she wasn’t there, and a while later she came back to bed. ‘Where have you been?’ he said. No answer, or if there was one he missed it as he drifted off again with her fingers stroking his back, a motion interrupted as she turned a fresh page of her book, and he waited, his body craving the resumption of touch like a fish getting closer to the surface of water and blazing. Remarkable it was to be the happiest man alive.
There was a knock at the door. Abbey and Tina entered with breakfast trays.
‘What’s this?’ Hooke sat up.
‘Nothing much,’ said Tina.
‘Only all those outrageous luxuries they wouldn’t let you carry at the station,’ said Liz.
Humbled, Hooke glanced out the window into the bright early day, fighting back sudden tears while breakfast was attentively laid out on the bedspread. The window framed granite boulders and pale, bare soil. A straggle of wrinkle-backed ewes filed across the corner of the view. Merinos were always such sad-sacks. The blue shadow of poplars elongated on the ground. When Hooke looked back into the room and bit a square of toast dripping with butter and Vegemite he felt that if he died at that moment, and that was all he ever had, it would be enough.
Abbey buttered a croissant and spread it with strawberry jam, then put it on a small china plate and handed it to him. What antennae these girls had, smiling into his eyes, their hearts unerringly picking up what was right. Even when the faintest signal came in they felt its force.
*
One day soon afterwards the agency door rattled the way Hooke expected – a bit demandingly, a bit overdone. He didn’t need to raise his head to know the touch.
‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ said Jenny Garlick.
‘Mind the phone,’ Hooke told her, seeing Merrington’s barging outline ripple through the double glass doors.
Hooke strode to the front of the shop and made a heartfelt greeting: ‘Good morning to you!’
Merrington looked pink-cheeked and fresh. Off the grog, thought Hooke, taking a punch to the shoulder delivered with a hard man’s pugilistic reach. A token of friendship perhaps, it would leave a bruise.
‘I’ll have that legendary cuppa I’ve heard about.’
‘Name your poison, Ted.’
Merrington looked along the shelf. ‘Could I have a Milo?’ he play-actingly whimpered.
‘Good choice.’
‘Strong, two sugars.’
‘Coming up.’
‘Ouch!’ Merrington mimed as they sat down in the swivel wing chairs under the stairs.
‘Sciatica still troubling you?’
‘I had a fall. Galloped the paddock crosswise and connected a chukka, but then my pony – not mine, lent by Frizell – chose its moment to belly-flop. Flattened out like the bejeezus. Actually, Hooke, I found myself forking up and stepping off. But I was jolted and the old trouble’s back. Limped around using my polo mallet as a walking stick. Not much sympathy from Frizell.’
‘You mean Lionel Frizell?’ said Hooke.
‘Kit, the son. He’s a bit of a lad.’
As if Hooke didn’t know it. The Frizells lived at Pullingsvale a hundred kilometres away where the high, tumbled country of the Isabel flattened to grass plains, and horsebreeding and the polo calendar dictated the year. The grandparent Frizells, now pushing up capeweed in the family plot, had been valued clients of Careful Bob in the distant past, whereas Lionel and Kit rarely paid without a summons and Hooke had long since stopped their account. But sometimes they met at cattle sales, and when eye contact was made a cheque would be scribbled and passed over with an air of largesse, putting Hooke on the drip-feed till next time.
Merrington took a deep breath through flaring nostrils. ‘Polo is my game,’ he declared. ‘I’m less than useful, though Kit says he’ll try me as “B” reserve player one day, so I must be doing something right.’
‘You certainly must be. At your age.’
‘There’s life in the old dog yet. If it doesn’t work out there’s always the Galloping Wombats, if they’ll take me on.’ He flashed an inquiring grin.
Hooke ignored it and busied himself with the electric jug. Obviously Merrington knew that he played polocrosse sometimes; knew it, too, as a game for tradesmen and pony clubbers in polo parlance.
Hooke said dryly, ‘The Wombats have their standards. But you wield a mean length of plastic pipe, Ted, I’ve noticed, with a classy wrist action.’
‘Touché,’ said Merrington, giving his Milo a slurp. ‘By the way, Kit and Annabelle are coming for dinner on Saturday night. Why don’t you and your good wife join us?’
So there it was, the invitation after all this time, rather offhand and at short notice.
Merrington peered at Hooke over the rim of his mug with a twinkly expectation. It occurred to Hooke to beg off, make an excuse, let the whole thing drop.
‘Bring your daughters,’ said Merrington. ‘Abbey the carroty one and Tina the little blonde.’
Offhand, just like that.
Hooke stared at him, trying to make something of it.
Merrington grabbed a copy of The Land and read out the long-range forecast.
‘El bloody Niño strikes again. This has happened to me before, Hooke, every time I take up a new piece of country – rain to the north, rain to the south, but wherever I happen to throw down my swag there’s bugger-all.’
‘It’s a dry,’ agreed Hooke, amused at the way Merrington talked himself up.
‘Your bumph said “safe district”. I should have allowed for the bullshit factor.’
That Merrington blamed Hooke for long-term weather patterns was a pretty good joke. It raised the stock agent to the level of a god and made every humorous bite a supplication. For this reason, whatever Merrington wanted Hooke was ready to give to him at that moment, except he still had to know what it was.
‘This is Australia,’ said Hooke. ‘Safe means divide by two and take away the number you first thought of. Anyone with half a brain knows that.’
Merrington pulled a small, defeated face.
‘I’ll remember it next time you build my hopes.’
The point was obvious and Hooke came to it: ‘Short of feed, Ted?’
Merrington squirmed in his chair.
‘It’s not only that, it’s the feeding out. I can’t even hoist a bale without feeling as if my knuckles have been torn from their sockets.’
‘Where did you get your hay?’ said Hooke.
Merrington blinked in puzzlement.
‘You mean because I didn’t buy it from you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I had a shedful back on the old place after I de-stocked. I trucked it down when they settled, and I had my five other cows there too. Now I’ve got too many – bad timing. I hear it’s pissing down at the old place, has been for weeks.’
Hooke leaned back in his chair, his smile changing from a jagged slit in galvanised iron to something cosier, more forgiving. Better men than Merrington made mistakes on a larger scale.
He made a decision: ‘Look, Ted, have you got an hour or two?’
‘Right now? I’m stuck while Tinkers do a drive shaft on the Merc.’
‘Okay, let’s go.’ Hooke grabbed his hat. ‘I want to take you somewhere.’