The Following, page 10
From every direction, it seemed, the Friendly house looked down from the ridge. Roofing iron glimmered like solder, revealed and unrevealed, as Ross rattled along. From knolls and saddles he looked down on roads cutting between paddocks and the dust of cars creaming behind them.
One night Ross found himself almost on top of it, the Holden, Australia’s Own Car, the bloke’s own car sitting in a paddock, engine switched off, a dollop of gleaming bumper bar, green instrument lights, curved, shiny duco and flat passenger-side windows.
*
LUANA WAITED AT THE REAR door of the Kurrajong for the Holden to come and collect her after Marcus’s note was sent: I need a breather.
The tones of a solo clarinet wafted over the dry grass paddocks of the capital. Luana was dressed and ready for the Jubilee of Federation Ball, with the new PM presiding, and Jim Gussey and the ABC Dance Band playing. At the most critical and dangerous of moments, the rolling stock edged the downslope and Marcus’s chest was like a vice of crushing steel.
Through a screen door of the hostel Luana could see the kitchen hands, cooks and waitresses bringing dessert dishes back. Wearing his old cardigan, Marcus emerged into the night talking to Tim, a hand on Tim’s shoulder, before coming around the back to find Luana. He was pale as milk, drawn as wire, between his eyes a shadowy dent that seemed to have been pressed by a pair of knuckles.
They exchanged a look. Just the two of us for this. Let’s go and find Pearl.
Tim wore a tux. Later, when Luana returned to the ball, there’d be jitterbugging on the spot and gripping each other by the elbows so Tim wouldn’t fall over. They’d weave away into the night after the national anthem, two haughty old party survivors and one of them, Luana, a long since derailed revolutionary brought to book by the consolation of Tim.
Marcus went on, sat in the car and waited.
Tim said, as people joshed him and the car drove off, ‘What will the bloke be doing tonight, you ask? Dancing? Not on your life. Cut the bull. He’ll be in his room at the Kurrajong, tucked into bed – reading. He’s a little tired, a little worn out you might say. What’ll he be reading? My money’s on Shakespeare – the Immortal Bard. Why Shakespeare? Steady on. Give him a break. Because he’s Marcus. Blow sweet the bugle of days gone by in the old School of Arts. Get the point – a Shakespearean king is never safe, he’s never the one and only.’
Let them make of that what they would. That their man, the new PM, would find it out? Crushed with honours, maybe.
The truth of Marcus’s reading, Tim knew, was more likely a Wild West novel with the cover turned back in a scroll and held to the bare globe of a reading lamp like toast to the fire, a dog-eared epic of cowpokes and dudes. The old Comanche with his hocus-pocus. The sorely used but kindly whores. The tang of cordite, akin to tobacco firing the brain, the whipcrack of lead from a .44-40, the rifle that won the West.
A Shakespearean king was never safe, he was never the one and only. Likewise the sheriff buried on a rocky outcrop, honoured by the few.
All was spirit there, where Tim could never go.
MARCUS AND LUANA DROVE OUT through Queanbeyan towards Bungendore, over a narrow wooden bridge, through a gate and into a paddock adjoining the railway line. The ticking-over of the car engine was tranquil, a fettlers’ trike going smoothly along at the work of keeping the rails intact.
Marcus doused the headlights, switched off the ignition. They listened to the pings of the engine block cooling. The stars were bright and low, one of them so low it was more like someone sitting on the line with a lamp.
‘Why now?’ said Luana.
She meant why Shep.
‘Why now?’ she repeated, when there’d been nobody like Shep in all the decades of Marcus’s public life. Luana of all people would know, having attended Marcus from dawn to dark with her HB pencils and sheets of postage stamps, her teledex with emendations comprising a lifetime of names and influence. Often she’d be in her office typing up letters as the clock struck midnight. She’d know of any hanky-panky. And there was some. Flirtations over tea and biscuits after mass. You could call it nothing – nothing like this.
‘Struth,’ said Marcus. ‘Shep. Sheppy. You have to ask?’
‘I do,’ said Luana.
Marcus leaned forward, peering through windscreen glass.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Because when I turned from what had me’ – he meant electoral duties, ministries, the war and that gift of smoke, given by the party, the prime ministership – what had me! – ‘there Sheppy was. A dish.’
‘A dish who’s expecting?’ said Luana, with only a touch of feeling.
Marcus held a palm flattened against his chest. He grinned with a surge of pain. ‘It’s true, she is in the family way.’
‘So now, Marcus?’
‘So now I can stop this always managing,’ he wheezed.
She thought, having lost one inheritance, his lifetime’s, he goes to another. And means to make it happen like everything he’s done. She had never asked him if he was for or against the hangings. Never needed to. Marcus was a man of the state. What the state was then was something the state was unlike now, thanks to a bloke’s prodigious capacity for work and mastery of detail.
He wanted, Luana knew, to go up and sit on those rails. She couldn’t stop him. He couldn’t help it. The bloke on a railway line! Sitting on the rails like a shunter with his billy! – it was why they’d come out here, on a night spin. Railway kids to their last breath.
Marcus’s forehead rested on the steering wheel. He made a small, wincing cry.
Reaching into her handbag, Luana acted swiftly, placed the glass vial dose in his lap and looked away as he needled himself in the inside leg with his flies open, buttoned himself and breathed out a long sigh eased of pain.
‘It is the hell of a managed fate,’ he said, ‘to tackle what is coming. To a high degree, politics is that. Right up to and almost including the hand from above.’
Frogs and crickets made a din as Marcus opened the car door. Getting over a barbed-wire fence and twenty feet up to the line was possible to him now.
He walked around the bonnet of the car and leaned in through the passenger-side window. A sheen of mist lay in the hollows. The din of swampland was a subsumption of time. The two girls went, Luana and Pearl, in the reeds and grasses – put your ear to the night Marcus Friendly to find them.
‘Just hear those frogs,’ said Marcus. ‘I don’t reckon Jim Gussey and the ABC Dance Band could do better than a frogs’ chorus, do you, Luana?’
‘No, Marcus, I don’t,’ she said.
LUANA WAS NEVER TO TALK about it. Not publicly, only ever to Tim. But there was, in fact, another witness to Marcus’s climb up to the rails – Ross Devlin, a witness into a year when the rails are mostly all torn up, when the cockatoo still shrieks, ‘Maaarcus!’, rusty with it.
Some things Ross Devlin never talks about, or hardly ever, but thinks about as he drives home to Inverarity Station (the Swampland Block) through the trunks of big-rooted river red gums with shield and canoe bark scars.
Ross is past the age the bloke was then, well into his seventies.
It feels freakish, wrong – that a whole unimaginable boy’s lifetime has passed. He’s been to Ireland, he’s lived the prediction the bloke made when he held the inherited stone and hefted it from one hand across to the other and musingly, absent-mindedly, put it down somewhere and allowed his attention to pass on to something else. At Inverarity Station, Ross has made his life among people never his own – the squattocracy set, the MacKinlays and Morrisons. He’s married a Milburn, fathered an interesting lot who’ve spread far and wide. Stamped his connection to the dirt in a way that was odd for an Australian to do, without shame or division, when he started. Hard to believe what time throws away, what it keeps. The cockatoo Fiver is a shredded rag of a bird with a heart of pulsing sinew. Ross is a proletarian sympathiser all through in a country of head-butting, true-blue merinos.
The headlights of his Toyota scoop the darkness and throw it away back behind him. Ross likes having a mate in politics who can tell him what goes on behind closed doors, about who has knives out for whom. A friend of his, a member of parliament, Max Petersen, bon vivant, lining up for a ministry year after year, indiscreet on most matters, holding silence on one, has been good for that.
Ross taps the steering wheel, keeping time to the humps and corrugations of the Inverarity track.
The bloke danced a dance that night, not a ballroom dance but a railway dance. It took a knack to skip sleepers, and the bloke had it still.
When he toppled, a shape just darker than the night, Ross held back from going to help him. For it seemed there was someone there to catch him – a man or a beast or a shadow or a thief, Ross would insist, but only to Max Petersen, when they talked about it, which was only between themselves when Max came out from time to time to visit Ross on the Swampland Block and a bottle of sallow and silvery hooch passed between them across the bare wood kitchen table. A man or a beast or a shadow or a thief – or – as Ross thought as he peered into the deepening dusk, a woman, thin as a scythe, knobbly as a stick, fierce as lightning, the bloke’s secretary, Mrs Luana Atkinson, scrambling up the line and catching Marcus as he fell.
Book Two
The Morrison Hitch
KYLE MORRISON: THE BOY IN the ten-gallon hat, the born-to-the-saddle, handsome young coot of ‘Prince of the Dryblow Races’.
Kyle, our eyes are on you
Coo-ee, the future’s sound
Hear, the stockwhip’s fracture
Kyle, you’re homeward bound.
Not the world’s greatest poem, agreed, but note the third comma down, the pause before the whipcrack. You’d need a microscope to see how one comma differed from another down a page, yet to Kyle Morrison, son of Bounder Morrison, that comma had, and always would have, the effect of a prophecy or accusation, a belt to the ear, a hidden shock.
Kyle didn’t like the effect. Never had. Always wouldn’t. Nothing that wasn’t great poetry should have anything like a powerful effect.
All his life Bounder Morrison never gave up. ‘Don’t like it, sonny?’
‘I do,’ said Kyle.
‘You don’t. You’re too bloody sensitive. Son, you ought to be proud. Enjoy the limelight. “Kyle” has a ring to it. “Prince” is a rank royale.’
‘But I’m not –’ said Kyle, but he couldn’t say what he was not in the context of who Bounder said he was. He could not get rid of the feeling of there never being enough words to express what that was.
Kyle Morrison had galloped, propped, reared, cracked the whip and won the mulga-wood trophy at the Dryblows more or less as described and celebrated nationwide in the poem. So he did not mean not pleased, or not proud, but could not say what he was not, or not not.
He was not not Kyle, one over from a centaur. He was not not that born-to-the-saddle boy, because he was never happier as such. At school he was not even ‘not much of a scholar’, like most of the dunces there, because he shone right enough – but he could never seem to say exactly what it was he was trying to say to his own satisfaction compared with the picture his father drew of him.
‘Tongue-tied?’ said Bounder, twisting Kyle’s ear, ruffling his hair, giving him a little bellying push of affectionate fatherly antagonism.
The difficulty was something that was not, nor was not not, but that inexpressibly was – a promise that came out, hinged on a comma, as a curse. It was on that punctuation mark that Kyle’s future was dangled before it had even begun.
When that boy, Kyle Morrison, turned twenty, he announced his engagement to Elisabeth Woodger. He was too green in his father’s loud opinion for marriage, but Elisabeth was a young woman able to silence Bounder just by smiling at him in a lovely, daughterly way.
On their honeymoon Kyle and Elisabeth went to New Zealand on the Mariposa and stayed with Colonel and Mrs Mackenzie Anderson, who farmed on a headland looking north from the Firth of Thames onto the Hauraki Gulf with its islands and promontories.
The Colonel was a gentleman farmer with a big house separate from the manager’s cottage, bedrooms set up for visitors: a leadlight-windowed drinks’ cabinet and a wide, comfortable bed with a canopy of mosquito netting where the married lovers lay like Mars and Venus trapped in Vulcan’s web, scratching the welts raised by sandfly bites, which swelled a year later on the first anniversary of their visit to the Shaky Isles.
Riding around the farm and along beaches they were joined by a teenager, Maggie, niece of the farm manager. She and Elisabeth were quickly like sisters, close in age. For years afterwards they corresponded with cards at Christmas and on birthdays, gifts of blue booties and knitted jackets after Maggie had children, and Kyle and Elisabeth, with increasing disappointment, did not.
Maggie had four boys from 1936 to 1945, receiving a parcel with a pink outfit from Australia, at last, when she had a girl that year, Margaret. The package from Kyle and Elisabeth was sent, as ever, from Inverarity Station, north-western New South Wales. As her friends wrote of their life in Australia, its ups and downs, Maggie gained a picture in her mind of haughty emus, boxing kangaroos and black swans with eyes like phosphor lamps – all from the books of Bounder Morrison’s poetry they sent. Margaret, the youngest, when she came to Sydney as a journalist in later years, arrived ready-equipped with Bounder Morrison tongue twisters learned by heart and a longing to visit Inverarity Station.
IT WAS HIGH TIDE ACROSS the flats on Kyle and Elisabeth’s last day’s honeymoon beach picnic. Kyle took photographs with his Vest Pocket Kodak. The three new friends sat in a huddle talking about tennis, cricket, horses, dogs, dances and books – with Kyle being a touch avuncular and Elisabeth just a bit motherly and guiding in her conversation towards Maggie.
Kyle recited part of a Bounder poem with a show of what a poem ought to be but couldn’t be unless it was acted out in just the way he knew how, with pride and belittlement:
Cornfounded Blight, it just ain’t right,
When yore feeling pinched
It gets you right
An inch to the left orrina pinch to the right
Yore forfochen.
That last word meant something like ‘blasted’ or ‘all done’ in Scots, he said.
Away out on the water a flash of sunlight came and went. Maggie said it was a whale or a dolphin splashing in the water.
‘Then I’m Jonah,’ said Kyle.
Earlier in the day there’d been a rumble under the house of a kind visitors to Fernland didn’t mention, lest they be laughed at through thinking the ground under their feet was about to open and swallow them up.
Now a movement of water travelled down the Gulf waters towards them. It swelled with the impression of a rolled carpet or a giant sausage or a huge water pipe. Maggie’s fox terrier ran to the water’s edge barking. Maggie, the explainer of all things New Zealand, had never seen anything like it. A tidal wave.
On the wave came, and for a moment they found themselves looking into a magnification of the sea floor upraised in front of them – pebbles, pippies, small darting fish. They gathered their picnic basket and beach blanket, and ran to higher ground. The tide foamed around their ankles, up to their knees, until finally it expired, frothing, in the kikuyu grass. An old dinghy, part buried, rose up and floated off.
Before they could even begin to consider what had happened the tide retreated, sucked down a plughole or drained over the edge of the world or piped to the centre of the earth. They heard its rush, its musical trickle, its burp in the mud. The earth gave a shuddering swallow and everything stopped.
‘Holy forfochen,’ said Kyle, an expression that seemed allowable in light of the matter on hand but made Elisabeth blush every time.
Stingrays, sharks, jellyfish and snapper were exposed, beating wetly on the mud, attacked by gulls chased by the barking dog.
Little or nothing of the disturbance was visible in Kyle’s spotty, quaintly tilted Kodaks of the gleaming mudflats. But the three would never forget that day. It bound them within the radiating rings of a shock wave generated deep in the earth. They learned that an earthquake had killed hundreds and destroyed the town of Napier many miles away.
THAT BOY, KYLE MORRISON, by the mid-1970s was sixty-five, manager (and former owner) of Inverarity Station, north-western New South Wales. Bounder was long dead and Kyle the principal copyright trustee of the Bounder Morrison Literary Estate.
‘Cornfounded Blight’ was set to music and celebrated as high as Parliament House, Canberra, played by the Combined Services Brass Band at garden parties and national welcomes.
Call it a jingle or a ditty or a joke, ‘Cornfounded Blight’ was bigger than any of those and Kyle could do nothing about it. Australia liked it. Australia was a desolate one-tenth of the planet, a puzzle to its population, and apparently needed an anthem to equal it. Kyle could do without it. Those sixteen lines made people feel good about what they hated. What you loved, you scorned; what you hated, you were. It was the definition of Australia and being Australian as far as Kyle was concerned, but it made him wonder if it would be better being someone else from somewhere else, stepping right out of who he was and living in another country altogether, or even another planet. A man, for example, standing on a timeless beach and looking into the middle of a wave where the sea life swam past in front of his eyes, giving the feeling of there never being any land, only sea over everything, and the best world of all possible worlds was a world of water.
Lately, people had started putting their hats over their shirts when ‘Cornfounded’ was played on public occasions. It was a reflection of the country’s riddle – half this, half that, and three hundredweight of something else, call it bulldust.
When ‘Cornfounded’ came up, that one word in the original, ‘forfochen’, proved a handicap despite freedom to bandy about four-letter words in public being won in the decade now three parts done. ‘Forfochen we arrived on this shore aye forfochen’, meaning exhausted, beaten, stuffed, rooted – as bellowed by schoolboys, drunks and rabble-rousers – meaning just what Bounder grinned when he wrote it, what he reckoned it should mean.
