The Following, page 18
After a time he heard Elisabeth quietly breathing, sleeping. He could hear his loud heartbeat, then, the irregular clippety-clop of its rhythm.
Down in the overseer’s cottage Ross Devlin strummed his rickety guitar:
My name is Juanano de Castro
My father was a Spanish Grandee
But I won my wife in a card game
To hell with those lords o’er the sea.
Well the South Coast is wild coast and lonely
You might win in a game at Cholon
But a lion still rules the Barranca
And a man there is always alone.
IN THE MORNING, AFTER EVERYONE gathered for breakfast, Devlin asked for a quiet word with Kyle, who felt the sour breath of his overseer in his face, the smell of instant coffee still hot in the throat.
Kyle’s eyes rolled back, he pulled his head away as Devlin referred to the previous night’s business, the title deeds and their reversion to proper owners being the topic. There’d been drinks, a subdued air of triumph in Devlin as he swanned it with Powys and Margaret, and then, when Rosemary and Brian MacKinlay arrived, with them.
‘You and Rosemary have been thick on this for years,’ said Kyle.
‘I know you think that,’ said Devlin. ‘Not Rosemary. Not cooking anything up. I learned all about it from the bloke who works with the down-and-out. Then I passed it on. He’s all for the underdog down to his red corpuscles. The bloke, Max Petersen, his people have the bottom pub, the bloodhouse, The George.’
‘Nobody calls it “The George”,’ said Kyle.
‘You’re right.’
All those times Devlin jammed himself in a phone box making calls, thought Kyle. To Rosemary MacKinlay? To a bank manager? No. To a solicitor’s office and a juvenile agitator, a bloody little bloodhouse louse, Max Petersen, lining up ownership deeds subpoenaed from city vaults and faxing them to Rosemary and the Directors from a rotten party office, a trade union cell, in the name of a woman who’d have been hung as a wild young girl if she wasn’t so favoured. Well, it had to come this. History takes its revenge. A great shrinking down that operated in Kyle’s lungs like a closing fist.
‘That girl in the paper,’ said Devlin, ‘the one your visitor, Margaret, wrote up. The one that everyone, all of you, calls a slut.’
‘The Milburn girl?’ said Kyle.
‘Jenny. She’s my fiancée,’ said Devlin. ‘We had a bust up, she’s back, it’s all right now. We’re getting married.’
‘Christ, but she’s a woman,’ Kyle said, about to say something spiked, bitter and hurtful to his overseer.
Kyle then adjusted his words and made an acknowledgment: ‘She’s a woman of grace.’ And he’d almost said ‘of race’.
Any man composed of animal spirits – half-stallion, half-centaur – would feel a sacrifice worth making for a spell of insensible happiness with her.
‘Good on you, Devlin. You are in for a ride.’
Three qualities Ross Devlin appreciated in Kyle. His love of horses. His defence of Powys Wignall’s books. And his unpredictable heart. Ross only ever called Kyle boss when any of the three came up. They were the anodynes to their thirteen years of awkwardly getting along.
‘Get me the mare,’ said Kyle.
‘The black mare?’ asked Ross, knowing very well which mare Kyle meant.
‘The black.’ Kyle nodded.
‘Righty-oh, boss.’
Something was hard to put a name to, that Ross Devlin wanted to guard Kyle from, but could not, a semi-suicidal attachment to what was likely to kill him dead – untamed horses, venomous snakes and that sweep of land intermittently flooded, the Swampland Block.
‘Look,’ said Devlin. ‘Me and Jenny, after we’re married, we’re going to ask you something, if we can’t go and live on the Swampland Block.’
‘Ask? Ask me? Why me? Ask someone who owns it,’ said Kyle. ‘Ask your confounded Milburns. Ask her. Ask Jenny Milburn. Ask the old bat – your Mrs Luana Atkinson. Ask your lawyer friends. Your pinko-loving pinko set. Isn’t that the point?’
‘S’pose so,’ said Ross.
‘Ask Powys Wignall,’ said Kyle.
It was the saddest statement he’d ever made. He regretted saying it. There was no greatness in it. But there you were. It was out.
There was just one matter that Kyle had the power to take into his hands, his very own hands now, and that was to kiss Elisabeth goodbye as he did every morning of his working life, take a pair of well-softened reins into his grip and go on horseback towards a blurred line on the horizon, that opened out when you reached it, into a maze.
‘Get the mare,’ said Kyle, giving the order crisp as a stockwhip crack.
He pulled on the gaberdine riding coat that raked the ground when he walked, making him look a galoot in the saddle on those occasions when he rode under the beating rays of the noonday sun. Ross Devlin walked fast, keeping up with him. The black mare was being brought up to the horse yards. Ross followed orders on that, the boys brought her up, hardly able to contain her, so untamed and untameable she was.
And that was it for Kyle despite his having another three months grace on full salary, such as it was, before moving out, then half salary, half pension for two years while he set himself up on 250 acres of the Swampland Block that would be made over to him and Elisabeth freehold. His riding coat rubbed against the mare’s flanks with a sound like tearing paper.
POWYS WIGNALL FINDS THE WORDS that are unsayable till he says them, words that don’t console Elisabeth at all. Nor any of them much. But still Powys says them, and while he speaks Margaret Poole takes Elisabeth’s hand. It is almost a year since Kyle disappeared.
The Arcade is filled to the side doors and overflowing outside. Who knew Kyle had so many friends? The dead find them. As soon as the words are over there’ll be food and drink.
Smel, Cut and Spud can’t believe it. They always thought they were immortal – the whole four of them, including Kyle. Nothing in their experience of ageing and decay ever told them otherwise.
Kyle has not been found. Into the Swampland Block he went at a gallop. More like a bolt. (It will be forty years before remains are unearthed. The discoverer will be Ross Devlin, a man in his seventies, poking around in a midden and pulling a jawbone with a tooth attached from the bank of a billabong.)
Powys stands on a rough-hewn bench and reads out loud his conjectures that are everyone’s, if they really knew Kyle. Everyone’s except one’s.
‘No,’ says Elisabeth under her breath. ‘This is very impertinent.’ Powys’s words are too strong for her. Always have been. Powys has a right to them, but she hates them. Only she really knows, only she really loved Kyle, only she really that morning of his going had love enough in her heart to let him go. Watching him crack his breakfast egg. Watching him blow steam from his hot cup of tea. Watching him collect the last toast crumb with a tongue-wetted fingertip.
Catching Elisabeth’s eye, Powys lifts his jaw and she nods, almost imperceptibly, as if to say, Well then, get it over with.
So Powys gets to the point. Makes it happen.
And they all are there, on that morning unrecoverable from time.
‘The prickly bush rakes along the mare’s legs,’ says Powys, ‘scrapes her flanks. Kyle’s too good a horseman to allow it, he lets her go. Sends her home with a whack on the rump. The untameable mare, tamed, is home by nightfall.
‘On Kyle goes, his majestical riding coat reduced to tatters, and what does he care. He throws it off, it’s found. He gets rid of shirt, trousers, boots, and they are found. He takes off his wristwatch; it, too, is found. He breasts the waters of the shallow billabongs of the Block and he’s laughing.’
‘Yeah, he’s laughing,’ says one of the Milburn relations, sotto voce, a big happy overweight bloke who knows the Swampland Block like the back of his own hand but if he ever saw Kyle in that great expanse, the shadow of a man delightedly passing through, he’s not saying. If Kyle ever saw him he never mentioned it either. This man’s the first Milburn ever invited up to the house. The first in its history. He used to be invisible before. His relation Jenny Milburn, she’s there too, with her husband, Devlin.
The thought is that either Kyle drowned, or it was deliberate what he did next: he went into the water. Powys implies it was deliberate. Not so deliberate as inevitable. Anyway, hardly a whim.
Elisabeth thought, Oh, that’s brutal, but there’s justice in it, as the beginning of her married life came back to her, in the memory of a tidal wave rising clearly into view.
‘Now Kyle’s sculling on his back,’ says Powys, ‘moving through the muddy waters as the bright clouds glide over his head. Water splashes up past his ears, goes over his face but his face emerges, and dunks, emerges, and dunks, not washed clean because each time a line of silt gets deposited, and with it the small life of the place, tiny crustaceans and whatever, waterbugs, snails, and he thinks it was like this when he was a really small child, a happy enough boy before the rhymer ever pounced on him and he was left with an empty matchbox to fill.’
This gets a laugh. The rhymer. The pounce. The matchbox emptied of matches.
There’s quite a lot more, including:
Kyle, our eyes are on you
Coo-ee, the future’s sound
Hear, the stockwhip’s fracture
Kyle, you’re homeward bound.
And then everyone has their say, and the old boys sing the school song – boom chicka boom, and so on.
Book Three
The Yeomans Bend
STANDING ON THE VERANDAH AT CRATER BAY, looking down the estuary and out through the heads, Tiger Yeomans did one of his performances – snapper crunching shellfish on the shore. ‘They came up the creek into the paddock bottom, the cattle went down for a look.’
‘You were there?’ said Max.
‘Assume that,’ said Tiger, describing jaws, tiny serrated teeth, savage, almost suicidally semi-amphibian hunger as the crazed snapper flipped and grovelled. ‘Smell the mud, hear them squeal.’
You’d think Tiger was drunk, but he wasn’t. The other two, Max Petersen and Harry Johnstone, were drunk, or should have been, considering the amount they’d tossed down. Tiger was drinking water. He rattled ice in his glass.
Each day they started earlier.
A yacht, Workers Comp, sailed to the sub-Antarctic on bird counts and combed the Pacific for long-liners. She was heading down the coast to join them. Her progress was an hourly topic. She evoked another dimension, the elastic dimension of the sea.
‘I’d give anything to be out there,’ said Tiger.
‘At the helm?’ said Harry.
‘Assume that,’ said Tiger.
Max had the binoculars now. It was hard to see anything past the bushfire haze rolling down from the hinterland. The ocean had a smoked-glass look, blurred of detail but exciting to the mind. They were all of them sick of the land and the hold it had on them, for reasons that would last or would not, but Tiger was the one who said so.
The only expertise Tiger Yeomans had ever displayed around that heroic bolt, Workers Comp, a cutter-rigged ketch with a lifting keel, was to suggest an apostrophe in the name, they could choose where.
‘It’s not them,’ said Max, putting the binoculars down.
Until a few years ago Max had employed Tiger editing trade magazines, doing the writing, layout and distribution. Tiger kept the firm going after Max entered parliament. Tiger liked the work, keeping to his own thoughts and buffing sentences to needless perfection. His family thrived and was educated, the farm, Tussockdale, was paid off, and Sylvia went to the top of her profession. All thanks to Max in there on the backbench, working hard for a ministry.
Tiger extended his arms. ‘Everything was enormous in those days, a legend of itself. Crater Bay was a veritable fishbowl then.’
Max said, ‘And the whales?’
‘Snapper,’ said Tiger. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old.’
‘More that you weren’t born yet,’ said Harry.
‘Those snapper were, believe me, even making allowances, huge.’
Harry and Max held out their empty glasses. It was a vintage from Tiger’s Coriole stash and the third bottle between them. Tiger liked having a cellar full of reds for occasions, all the best names. It was how he wanted to be seen, exuder of largesse. Red wine did that as a man reached behind himself into a dusty cupboard. There were other aspects of the ideal amusing to his friends. Everything he’d ever wanted to do was tied up in fishing and boats. What he wouldn’t give to be out there in mid-ocean plotting a star-passage.
‘To the clean sea,’ said Tiger, clashing the ice in his glass.
Max and Harry gave Tiger the tolerance of a few salty quips. Emotion, agitation, verbal displays were Tiger’s ways of saying something that couldn’t be said. You’d find out later what it was. He was the friend who mistrusted their friendship but made it work.
Tiger’s father, Godfrey, had been a destroyer captain in the Med, Coral and China Seas during World War Two. In peacetime he steamed HMAS Thursday down from Jervis Bay and prowled the headlands, looking for the bonfire that signalled Tiger’s birth.
‘Too many years ago,’ said Tiger. ‘What have I done to trounce that? What totally over-the-top, completely magnificent, absolutely insane move have I ever made that hasn’t been bettered by my old man?’
‘You got . . . born,’ said Max.
A hesitation in the words, the kick of an old injury, gave ordinary statements of Max’s a touch of tension. He’d crashed his Jag in his twenties, no seatbelt worn, and given his cranium a shake on the Inverarity straight, hard right by Inverarity siding, after which, unlike the way similar accidents affected people, he seemed to have improved his grip on life, except his speech sometimes faltered.
‘You made a life of your own, the one you w-wanted,’ he said. ‘We did that together.’
‘It’s not finished,’ said Tiger, cracking ice on his back teeth.
Max ground his cigar into the dog dish, trying not to send sparks over the verandah rail. The dry bush wanted to go up. Smoke slid between trees from forested ridges. It burned the throat.
Up in the guest cottage Sylvia and Sonia sat in a window seat watching the last light fade, the first stars come out. From the sound of their laughter you’d think nothing was wrong, nothing changed from the pattern of every summer at Crater Bay since they’d started coming down there as a bunch of friends in the 1970s. That was over forty years ago. Easy enough for Sylvia, in good health, to trust to the memory, but for Sonia, sick, getting sicker, hilarity in the circumstance was heroic. Each time her doctor, John Saul, ran tests, the news was dire, yet her lightness of mind increased, or seemed to.
Tiger watched Harry’s face, every catch of Sonia’s laughter reflected as hope, every paroxysm of coughing as fear.
Tiger leaned on the verandah rail and gazed down the estuary. ‘I do want to be out there,’ he said.
The fishing you could understand with Tiger, but sailing boats, ocean-going boats, yachts at the wind’s command? Each had a role to fill in their friendship circle. Jake and Judith Try did marine research. Harry did architecture on a big scale – Kuala Lumpur, Bahrain, Beijing. Max Petersen was the federal member for Parslow, in line for a ministry, ever-hopeful and awaiting the PM’s call.
Down the pecking order into the shallows and twinkling low-tide gullies, if you wanted a freshly caught fish ask Tiger. Give him a tin dinghy or a kayak, a handline and a bucket of bait – that was their Tiger, down from the hills for a spell of herding flathead and snapper, wearing his floppy blue fabric sheep cocky’s hat and smelling like a bait bucket.
Back in the days of Sergeant Pepper, flared trousers and revolutionary headbands, Harry, Max, Jake and Tiger had arrived at Crater Bay one uni vacation in Max’s green Jag. It was a step up from student identity into a more calculated style. A crippled old stayer had taken a shine to Max – Tim Atkinson. Hadn’t just given Max the car but handed the firm over as well.
Tiger had talked about his seafaring father (RAN, retired), then they met him. Godfrey Yeomans made pink gins and watched them choke them down. They looked like girls, he said, with their lank hair swinging. Being navy he was clothes-conscious as Yves Saint Laurent, white shorts with razor-sharp creases. When he sat in a cane chair a gappy opening appeared and his nuts showed in a hairy blaze.
Tiger dressed in those days in army disposals, tall and skinny. At nineteen he’d still hardly ever needed a shave, downy-cheeked, ringleted, he’d laughed too much at his father’s jokes, then looked sour.
Years on, they pulled out a few spotty slides. There in the Kodaks Godfrey had a Beatles haircut, gingery hair a seaweedy thatch. The politicians had beaten him and he’d swanned with the younger generation more than they’d thought, a big-framed man, a bull walrus lurching up the track through the ti-trees and banksias after his early-morning swims. ‘Singing,’ said Max. ‘Bellowing out at the top of his voice.’
‘I never heard him sing much,’ said Tiger, no sort of expert on his old man’s bonhomie, though remembering ‘The Shooting of Dan McGraw’ and ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ foghorned on sentimental occasions.
Max, Harry and Jake scored an edge on Tiger by winning a friendship with Godfrey Yeomans, an influence. Godfrey wasn’t the only one they’d charmed, those three whose future achievements were always going to happen versus Tiger’s hopeful changes. A feeling of stacked weights remained after forty, almost fifty years. Max had been impressive young, preternaturally. Back when Tiger first knew him he’d swung what he liked to call (these days, not then) a land rights investigation by doing the title searches and settling the Aboriginal Milburns back on their ancestral land when he was only an articled clerk. Just don’t, please, raise the subject of race with their old mate Ross Devlin. It’s not that Ross is not proud of the Milburns – his own children and grandchildren are Milburns. You can talk about things now that couldn’t be said then with pride, regarding family background. His Jenny he’s proud of, don’t mistake it, but too much of the bitter scorn of the landscape and the vexatious vituperation of country towns has rubbed into Ross for him to be open on that score.
