A Long Way From Home Page 11

  On the day Beverly arrived the police were out searching for my kidnapped children. My kitchen was so quiet and fretful that our tinny ticking little Westclox was getting on my nerves. And then, by jiminy, all quiet was murdered. Metal ripped and wood splintered and I felt the floor shudder in my shoes, as if some vital part had been removed by dental pliers.

  Outside I discovered, three feet from my back door, a car connected to a long aluminium caravan the side of which was peeled open like a sardine can.

  Two sulky-looking boys climbed from the car. I was stunned to recognise my sister’s sons. Phonsey and Theo surveyed my house as if they hated it. They were darkly tanned, and had their swimmers on, as did the driver, Beverly, who modelled a bright pink one-piece with no accessory other than high heeled shoes.

  She had scraped her caravan along the full length of my house. Meanwhile Bachhuber was at the fence, raising his battered hat to her. Men are fools. My sister smiled and nodded, lifting that little nose she had been complimented on too often.

  ‘Yoo-hoo,’ she called to me.

  Yoo-hoo? I waited for an apology, an explanation. And what were her first words when she reached me?

  ‘That’s a good-looking man,’ she said.

  Even when I drew her attention to the damage she announced I was the lucky one, compared to her. For while her caravan was seriously hurt, my house only required a lick of paint. The phone began ringing. I thought, police. The phone stopped. Bachhuber was staring, I thought, at Beverly’s neat bottom. Was he blind to the implication of the caravan? Couldn’t he see the warning written across her forehead, the way her whole body was leaning towards me, like a creature looking for a snack, then retreating (rearing, pulling back alarmingly) from the possibility of dire affront? Any listener to the quiz show knows that certain fruits signal their poisonous content to birds. You would think a quiz king could read my sister, but no: he removed his hat and smiled. So this was how Miss Clover stole his quiz show from him?

  And off he goes, I thought, Mr Handyman, riding to repair and rescue, lowering his stepladder on my side of the fence.

  I drew my sister inside my kitchen where she could cause no more public excitation. She did not ask about my kids which she should have. She was deaf until she had located the wireless and settled herself at my kitchen table with an ashtray and her cigarettes. When I spoke, she hushed me. She just had a horse race she must listen to.

  Her boys vanished into the shed where a freshly detailed FJ Holden sat waiting for their smudgy fingers.

  I made a pot of tea and listened to my sister lose her bet. If I had had half a brain I would have understood why she had no money.

  ‘Is he single?’ she wished to know.

  I said our neighbour was a teacher, meaning his wages would be insufficient for her purpose.

  ‘He has women coming in and out of there,’ I said.

  And then here was bloody Bachhuber, tapping at the flywire door. He had his ladder and a toolbox and was ready to do the neighbourly thing to my damaged wall. I would rather not have brought him in, but there was Miss Geelong, clip-clopping across the lino in her clever little shoes.

  ‘Beverly Gleason,’ she said.

  She was thirty-five years old, in her bathing suit.

  ‘Willie Bachhuber,’ he said.

  ‘What a musical name.’

  ‘As in Bach, you mean?’

  Beverly smiled and frowned at once. I told Bachhuber that Mrs

  Gleason and I had business to attend to and I dragged the little tart into the living room.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she hissed.

  I told her to stay away from him. He had suffered quite enough.

  So then, of course, I must have a crush on him, and I could have slapped her face but the telephone rang and it was Constable ‘Lurch’ McIntyre who had had a call from Ron Durham to say Dangerous Dan Bobs was causing a nuisance at the Lerderderg River.

  ‘Are my kids OK?’

  ‘No worries,’ he said. ‘They’re with their grandfather.’

  He was a moron. He knew nothing. I rang off to deal with my sister and her dirty smirk. If my face was red it was nothing to do with what she thought it was.

  I asked her outright: ‘Where are you off to?’

  In other words: please leave.

  ‘Caravan parks aren’t as cheap as you’d think.’

  ‘Bev, I got the same money you got. You can’t have spent it all yet.’

  ‘I took your advice,’ she said, colouring as she was bound to. ‘Everything’s tied up. So where am I even meant to live? Tell me.’

  And of course she was my flesh and blood. I had to let her stay here in her bloody caravan. She would be no trouble, honest. But she would suck up my electricity and eat my food. Her kids would fight with my kids. She would clutter up the yard which was, for now, our showroom.

  Constable Lurch phoned again.

  ‘Are you acquainted with Theodore Gleason and Alphonse Gleason?’

  ‘You can tell their mum,’ I said. ‘When you get here.’

  Throughout this conversation Bev dramatised her poverty, counting out the small change in her purse. I wished Titch was here to read her the riot act, but he was in Footscray to inspect the second fuel tank which was being tailor-made to fit inside the boot.

  He therefore missed his father’s invasion of our kitchen. With him came our kids, head to heel in mud. Then Constable Lurch who wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea. Then Theo and Phonsey with their smudgy upper lips and smutty teenage eyes. Last came Bachhuber himself.

  And they all shoved into my place without any invitation and then, without permission, as if he were a miracle himself, the mongrel Dan upended a chaff bag full of fish.

  I wished his son had been a witness to the act.

  21

  Mrs Bobbsey was staring daggers at me.

  The God of the Wind was spreading out his arms above his catch.

  They were redfin, by golly. Twenty of them, thirty. Beverly Gleason got a big one, ten pounds at least, gleaming olive green with broad vertical bands of anthracite across a deep body and bright reddish-orange pelvic and anal fins. She slid her fingers in the gills and lifted, and I saw the pale smooth underside of her brown arm.

  ‘Do you want to feel the weight, Mr Bachhuber? I never knew they grew this big.’

  Did it matter that this same fish had been the constant companion of my tumescent adolescence? Of course. Why else would I be suddenly transported to the weed-rank banks of the secret River Torrens where it snakes along the edge of Payneham, hemmed by thistle, and rusting corrugated iron, and stinging nettles, and sappy fat paspalum, musty with our amateur desire?

  I had been too young to buy a ‘French letter’ in the chemist shops – they would have laughed at me – but there was a news- paper seller on King William Street, Bert, who would flog them to us boys in ones and twos, not without a dirty joke. He had thinning red hair and a sweaty head. Like putting a sock on a banana, he said.

  The redfin Perca fluviatilis which now covered the Bobbseys’ lino floor was the same fish that colonised my childhood river. My pastor papa taught me to catch them with a rod and tin of worms. He never knew how close we stood to the site of fornication. He showed me how to skin a redfin (not judging it necessary to kill them first). There was something very disturbing in the shuddering convulsive flesh.

  ‘Put it down,’ Mrs Bobbsey instructed her sister. ‘Go wash yourself,’ she told her son. She turned on the policeman whose little finger was crooked delicately around the handle of his cup of tea. ‘The orchard called you to complain?’ she asked him.

  ‘They started it,’ said Edith. ‘We were just fishing.’

  ‘This is not fishing. This is slaughter.’

  Edith hugged her chest with her skinny muddy arms. ‘The

  Durhams were there, Mum.’

  ‘Yes. The river goes through their property.’

  ‘We were just mucking around, staring in the water at the fish
and Grandpa said, could we eat them if we caught them and Mr Durham said, good luck mate, no-one ever catches them. They’re too smart for us. They hide out down in the snags.’

  ‘Help,’ cried Beverly as her redfin slithered free, sliding across the lino.

  ‘Quit it,’ said Mrs Bobbsey. ‘Act your age.’

  Beverly Gleason kneeled before her fish. Only the deep gut prevented it from vanishing beneath the fridge.

  ‘As I was saying,’ said Edith, ‘before I was interrupted. They gave us their permission. Grandpa told them he’s got this bubbling thing to attract the fish . . . ’

  The God of the Wind had been briefly distracted by Mrs Gleason’s kneeling form but he paid attention when his name was mentioned.

  ‘Grandpa,’ said Mrs Bobbsey. ‘You will have to leave.’

  ‘Grandpa said the fish would come look at the bubbling thing.’

  ‘Grandpa threw the bunger in the creek,’ cried Ronnie.

  Was I the only one who didn’t know they were discussing dynamite?

  ‘Everyone likes a bunger,’ said Dangerous Dan who would later say the same thing to the Sydney Morning Herald.

  ‘Explosion is not an activity permitted by a fishing licence,’ said the constable. ‘Not that this applied in your case, Mr Bobs, if you get my drift.’

  ‘You wash yourself,’ Mrs Bobbsey said to Edith. ‘You too,’ she told her sister.

  ‘Grandpa bombed the creek,’ cried Ronnie. He shoved his hands into his crotch and lifted one foot in the air.

  ‘Go now,’ said Mrs Bobbsey. ‘If you have to pee, go now.’

  ‘Boom,’ cried Ronnie. ‘Boom.’ And ran out down the garden path and banged the dunny door behind him.

  The mass murderer of fish was bathing in his glory. He stood in the midst of his harvest and rocked back on his heels and thrust his hands deep in his dustcoat pockets. He raised a flirty eyebrow at Beverly and, from his dustcoat pocket, produced what might have been a sausage wrapped in fatty brown paper, my mother’s Landjäger to be precise. If there was animosity towards him, he did not seem to notice.

  ‘Everyone likes a bunger.’

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ said Mrs Bobbsey. ‘Edith go to the bathroom. Now. Go. Dad, a word outside?’

  ‘Come on.’ Dan tossed the Landjäger to his granddaughter. ‘It’s not dangerous.’

  ‘Get out.’

  Mrs Gleason was staring at me and I looked away.

  ‘Only teasing,’ Dan said. ‘Bachhuber you haven’t spoken.’

  ‘Leave Mr Bachhuber alone, all of you,’ Mrs Bobbsey cried, at the same time trying to wrest the Landjäger from her daughter.

  ‘It’s just gelignite,’ Edith said. It’s not dangerous, Mum. Grandpa could blow up the dunny while Ronnie was sitting on the seat.’

  ‘You could, could you, Dad?’

  ‘I’ve played some pranks. No-one ever hurt themselves.’

  The air itself was unstable and Mrs Bobbsey’s lips were set thin and tight with rage.

  ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Outside. Now. Chat.’

  The God of the Wind put up his fists. ‘You want a fight like a man?’

  Mrs Bobbsey held wide the flywire door. ‘Please, Dad, please.’

  ‘When you’re in the Redex you’ll wish you were experienced with gelly.’

  Mrs Bobbsey let the door swing shut again. ‘How do you mean?

  What about the Redex?’

  ‘I might be your competitor.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘I was in car trials before you were even born.’

  Mrs Bobbsey sat down. ‘You’re not in the Redex.’

  The old man offered a tight wide grin. ‘We’ll be friendly competitors.’

  ‘Can’t you just leave Titch alone?’

  ‘I was talking to my mate Murray – he was in last year’s Redex. He swears by the gelignite I gave him.’

  ‘Let us have a life, Dad.’

  ‘Murray reckons the road from Cloncurry has a stretch about eighty miles long. It’s so bloody narrow, and if a car breaks down ahead of you, you’re stuffed without a stick of gelly. Take a carton.

  Learn how to clear the road. I understand you’re nervous,’ he said to Mrs Bobbsey.

  ‘Get off his back.’

  ‘This won’t hurt anyone.’

  ‘All you do is hurt.’

  ‘I’ve been doing it for years. You can throw gelly in the fire and jump on it. It’s got to be detonated. So you’ve got your gelly with a poker the size of a pencil up the middle of it and then you buy the detonators. They’re the dangerous things,’ he said to Ronnie as he came back through the door. ‘Dets, they call them. Keep those things apart and you’re OK.’

  The God of the Wind laid a second stick of gelignite on the kitchen table. ‘Play with it,’ he said to Mrs Gleason. ‘Go on. Give it a whirl.’

  Ronnie took immediate possession of the gelignite and danced around the room, hitting himself on the head until his mother slapped his legs and he dropped the gelignite and ran away in tears.

  ‘I will clean the fish,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll help,’ said Beverly. ‘They must have a knife.’

  I had no choice but to stand close beside her as she turned her attention to a kitchen drawer. Her shoulders smelled of coconut and I pointed out a wooden handled knife and she placed it in my palm and closed my hand around it.

  The children were sent out of the room, and I set to clean the fish, standing at the table. Mrs Bobbsey was in the garden. Dan explained gelignite to Beverly who signalled her understanding, step by step. Just the same, it was she who went to find the flour for dredging. I made a sharp cut along each side of the spine. I caught the dorsal fin between thumb and blade, and then, like a faith healer, held it in the air. Then I drove my fingers into its body and lifted out all the flesh and peeled the skin away like a sock off a foot, and I paused a second as Mrs Gleason excused herself to Dangerous Dan. She took the fillet from me and dredged the sweet white flesh in flour. Feel the weight, I thought, not certain what was happening now. It was impossible.

  22

  We had days and days of fuss and bother. Bachhuber passed his driver’s test at Bacchus Marsh police station where they asked him what colour an orange was. He helped deliver new cars to customers and was useful in many ways, although not always available when we wanted him.

  Finally it was revealed he had been at the library in Melbourne, researching the Redex route, particularly the road north of Rockhampton because, he said, none of us had ever driven it. This was a presumption, but correct.

  After dinner he produced maps and notebooks. My sister was stimulated beyond all decency. Now she had a bloody pointer.

  ‘This is of more than academic interest,’ he said.

  Titch fastened onto ‘academic’.

  ‘As a matter of academic interest,’ he would ask Bachhuber who never knew his leg was pulled.

  The Redex certainly gave my husband something to look forward to but, as a ‘matter of academic interest’, I also loved to drive. Sometimes I fretted I would be left behind. On sleepless nights I imagined myself speeding across the floodplain Bachhuber described, the brigalow scrub, the flying rocks kicked up by other cars. This was my adventure, on the ‘Crystal Highway’, named for all the broken windscreen glass scattered along the verges. It was corrugated, guttered, crossed by creeks. When we heard it was also known as the ‘Horror Stretch’ we assumed it was on account of the road conditions. Bachhuber did not suggest otherwise until the kiddies were all in bed. Then he gave it to us, no holds barred.

  Titch left his beer untouched as he listened to these sickening stories.

  ‘This is really true?’ he asked.

  Beverly nodded vigorously. I thought, what could she know?

  Bachhuber said families had been forced off cliff tops, gunned down, babies brained with clubs. At Goulbolba, more than three hundred people had been shot or drowned which was called a ‘dispersal’.

  ‘This re
ally happened?’

  No, it was black people. It happened centuries ago. To me it was like a horror in the Bible. It was not from our modern time. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

  ‘God help me,’ cried Titch who would get upset listening to the story of the crucifixion. ‘What use is this to us?’

  He gave his full attention to the hundred and eighty miles through the Kimberley, from Mardowarra to Halls Creek, eight pages of strip maps, each sheet depicting a vertical black snake of track cut by fine straight lines and warnings of heavy sand and water crossings and gates across the road.

  ‘We know which way the gates open,’ cried Beverly, as if she made the map herself, as if she had flown on her broomstick two thousand miles across the red desert to the Kimberley, as if she understood the significance to us drivers who must confront these time-consuming obstacles. Just the same: if we knew which way they opened we would also know exactly where to stop, reverse, go forward.

  ‘Well blow me down,’ my husband said. ‘You clever bugger, Bachhuber. How could you know this? The postman?’

  Bachhuber’s eyes crinkled at my husband and I thought, he’ll be the navigator and I’ll be home being mummy. I admit to feeling doublecrossed by Titch. At that stage everyone was in love with Bachhuber, including, I have to say, my sister. At night we could hear them through the fibro walls, across the drive. Of course it was nothing to do with us, but we were the married couple and all the stress and tension of the Redex had dampened our affections. How sad it was to lie there, on our backs, not touching. I thought he had betrayed me.

  He rolled away and I mourned those years we had held each other all night long, our good life which we wrecked by bringing the Redex into bed. I could feel Titch beside me, wide awake, not liking me but wanting me.

  Beverly and Bachhuber woke me up. It was four in the morning and I went to the kitchen and made tea. Sooner or later she would go sneaking back into her caravan. I opened the back door and waited. A mopoke cried. The moon crept from behind a cloud. A smudgy cat stalked mice amongst the canna lilies. Finally I heard the soft pat of Bachhuber’s flywire door and then the rusty hinge of the garden gate. I turned on our back light so she would see me walk along the path to the laundry and wait beside the copper.