A Long Way From Home Read online

  ‘I am Garret Hangar, by the way.’

  ‘I am Willie Bachhuber.’

  We set off in his Morris Minor which had a roof rack full of tyres and the back seat crammed with cardboard boxes. He was a Public Servant, he soon confided, employed in a boring job with the government of Western Australia. He spent his lonely days, like this, ‘going round the traps’, he said, ‘delivering stationery’.

  Garret’s nose had suffered many years of sunburn but his blue eyes were youthful, enormously inquisitive. ‘So tell me young Willie Bachhuber,’ he said, ‘how you got to Broome.’

  Thank God, I thought, he is curious. This will be OK. If it were not for his tendency to engage with me rather than the road, I would have found him an unalloyed delight.

  I readily told him what I would have revealed to no-one else, firstly the whole business with Bennett Ash and my dismissal from my job, a story he applauded loudly. ‘Oh good for you, Bachhuber,’ he said. ‘If only there were more like you.’

  Thus he encouraged me in my recklessness.

  He had always admired schoolteachers he said, but we would never have good teachers if we did not allow for genius. He declared that I clearly had that quality, and I confess I was happy to be flattered and we rattled on down that corrugated road and I was less attentive to the road than I should have been.

  I revealed that I had, until yesterday, been a navigator in the Redex Trial. He said he would have given anything to be in my shoes.

  I told him I had a falling out with my crew.

  He said he was not surprised. He had thought of entering but had never found anyone he could get along with on the road. He had some jokes about expelling wind. I really didn’t mind.

  He wanted Redex stories. I gave them to him, gelignite, batteries, ice to pack a coffin, cable tangled in the brakes. He loved it all. He thought he and I should consider entering next year’s event and I was careless and happy and agreed with him. Why not?

  The course of our chatter led us to my father’s occupation and he was again delighted.

  ‘A Lutheran missionary,’ he said.

  I told him I had uncles who were missionaries but my father was a city man.

  ‘You might be wrong there Bachhuber,’ he said.

  ‘I would know, I think.’

  ‘You should bloody know, absolutely,’ he said. ‘I agree.’ And thus he revealed that character which, presumably, made it hard for him to find a co-driver. He would not give up on this business about my father. Finally I told him we should quit it.

  He offered an orange Lifesaver and I accepted.

  The road had by now degenerated. I observed, as he dealt with one particular creek crossing, that this was eerily like the road from Mardowarra. Completely déjà vu, I said: that dead beast, that broken fence.

  When he laughed, I found myself annoyed. ‘It’s not déjà vu,’ he said, ‘this is the same road.’

  ‘No, this is the road to Perth.’

  ‘The road to Perth was back at the Roebuck Roadhouse.’

  ‘But that was where you were to drop me.’

  ‘Oh, you should have said.’

  ‘I didn’t see it.’

  He laughed at me again. ‘Dear God man. Did you not see it?

  There is nothing else between Broome and Mardowarra and you didn’t see it.’

  ‘You said you had to drop me there.’

  ‘Well I forgot,’ said Garret Hangar.

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘How could you?’ he mocked then softened. ‘Mea culpa, mate.

  La Condition Humaine. And so forth.’

  ‘But what am I to do?’

  I expected the answer would be an offer to drive me back, but he didn’t change his speed. ‘It will all work out,’ he said, and smiled with red annoying lips. The lone and level wastes stretched far away.

  A fork in the road

  1

  No-one told me the Nullarbor Plain would be so cold. But then again, what about my marriage? Who would have predicted that turn in the road?

  Five hundred miles east of Perth I peed by the rear wheel and listened to my husband ‘tidying up the vehicle’. Translation: chuck out anything that Willie Bachhuber has touched. Any skerrick, any chip packet, caffeine pill, etc, pecking at the shadow of the other male. Nothing had happened with the navigator, but my husband clearly thought otherwise.

  This behaviour had begun in the warm red soil of the Kimberley. It continued south to Perth. It turned left across the bottom of the continent, onto these grey treeless limestone plains. Peeing beyond sight of the sea, I could hear the spooky ocean moaning. Sometimes I felt the phantoms surging through the caves beneath my feet.

  Titch unearthed a pair of Willie’s oil-stained shorts. I told him I had done nothing wrong. He threw the item in the dust. This would not be the end. There were always reserves of dried up orange peel for instance. He would have chucked the little boy’s skull away, except I would not permit it.

  Alright, give it to the abos, he said. But the blacks feared the evil spirits sleeping in the bones. I passed this information to my husband. In response he made jokes about mumbo-jumbo, voodoo. He was merciless, on and on. In Perth we heard the stupid hit parade, a song about a box that a woman can’t get rid of. He never heard a song so funny, especially when he changed the words.

  As I strolled one morning on Bondi’s tropic shore

  I spied a huge Ardmona box like I never saw before

  I hauled it in and looked inside to see what I could see

  And there was a great big beep-beep-beep staring back at me

  Oh, there was a great big beep-beep-beep, it was a mystery.

  Titch looked like he could sing, with his bright eyes and appley cheeks and that dark neat hair. You could imagine him a crooner like Sinatra, but he couldn’t hold a tune, he never could. Even when I loved him without reserve his voice was hoarse and broken. Now, on this grim plain, with a hole in the muffler which made conversation difficult, his rasping voice seemed cruel and taunting.

  ‘Take a joke, Irene,’ he said.

  I picked up the box and ran to town to pawn it in a shop

  The broker saw me coming and hollered I should stop

  He took his key, he turned his lock, and shouted through the door

  Oh, get out of here with that beep-beep-beep, before I call the law

  Oh, get out of here with that beep-beep-beep, before I call the law.

  There were so many verses. It went all the way to the pearly gates, and of course Saint Peter would not let him in.

  I had expected the Nullarbor Plain must be a scorching desert, and I had still thought so back in Perth, even when I had sat in the post office shivering in shorts, listening to Titch, on the phone, amusing the kids with new stories of the rascally wombat. He did not say he had run over a wombat and that we had to pull it off the road, the poor thing, dead and mangy with pus-filled eyes. These were our babies, and he had only love and cheer to offer them, and it was such a contrast with what he felt for me, I had to walk away and leave him to invent an excuse for Mummy. I could not have pretended happiness. I would have cried to hear their lovely voices, so I turned my back, and hid myself amongst the people looking up numbers in interstate directories. If I opened the Adelaide directory, it was only by chance. Of course I was pretending, and I looked up the only name I knew in Adelaide, and there he was, Bachhuber the pastor, and I did not have a pen so I just tore out the page and shoved it in my handbag.

  Our car was on the front page of the Perth West Australian. Just the same, I did not feel like I was winning anything and when we pushed west to the town of Coolgardie, the small city of Kalgoorlie, we were not the first cars in the pack. But we were still ahead by points, and when we arrived at lonely Norseman at four in the morning, we found its single street crowded and the shops all ablaze and I hated how people smiled at us and waved. They had stayed up all night to see us. It was wrong to hate them for grinning at the ruination of a family.
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  ‘Get used to it,’ my husband said. ‘This is the future.’ I did not trust him any more. I thought, he will divorce me once we get back home. For what? For nothing.

  When a flashbulb popped it seemed as if his face popped back at it, and he would be luminous with popularity all the way to Sydney. I would not get used to it, and I was outraged that he should trust vile Dunstan who had obviously filled his head with lies. I wished I had been guilty of adultery. I might have had some fun.

  Peeing on the desolate Nullarbor, no sign of human life, I hearda jet plane high above the clouds. I imagined Willie was in it. He would not laugh at what I felt.

  On we went, and on, Titch and I shouting at each other above the roaring exhaust, digging ourselves deeper when all we wanted to do was climb out of the hole we’d made. We drove through bright moonlight with windows closed uselessly against the limestone dust which drifted like smoke through the gnarled scrub and hurt our eyes and nostrils. Our feelings were like things previously unknown to us, moaning from beneath the road itself.

  I peed again. I took the wheel.

  ‘Am I a partner?’ I asked him. My boots were splashed and I felt disgusting and unlovely.

  ‘You are meant to be my wife,’ he answered. Meant to, I noted.

  ‘Yes, but not your partner?’

  ‘Say what you mean, Irene. We put some money in a syndicate,

  OK?’

  ‘Whose money?’

  ‘The odds were long,’ he said.

  ‘Who else is in this syndicate? It’s those Ballarat geezers isn’t it?

  Joe Thacker? And that man, the bookmaker?’

  This was a dumb guess and I was frightened to see that it was right.

  ‘You notice I’m not asking you questions?’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘I wouldn’t lower myself.’

  ‘Perhaps you should.’

  We passed the Vanguard Spacemaster, abandoned, lonely in the headlights, wrapped around a grid post. A mile later we got our third puncture and it was all hands on deck. The wind whipped the sand into my eyes and I thought, if Australia had a bottom, this would be the place it did its business.

  Of course Titch never thought like that.

  ‘There must be something can be done with this,’ he had said, earlier. He meant the Nullarbor, that there must be something useful to be done with this sand, this gnarled and stunted scrub, myall and mallee and mulga. ‘With careful and sympathetic organisation,’ he said.

  If I was irritated I tried not to show it. This was how he looked at everything and I had loved him for it.

  Ceduna is a small fishing town two thousand, three hundred miles from Broome, twelve hundred miles from Perth, five hundred miles from Adelaide. There were few garages and every one was full of Trial wrecks, including Wally Bishop’s Plymouth which had been in second place. No-one could fix our exhaust.

  As we left Ceduna the rain began to fall and I thought, thank goodness, that will lay the dust. But the road was soon a slippery mess and the rain was beating in gusts against the car.

  At dawn we passed miserable groups of poor blacks, families wearing rags the colour of cement. We were so tired, sleeping half an hour, driving half an hour. ‘Don’t muck this up,’ he said. I thought, what does he think has happened to us? Who will live next door in Bacchus Marsh?

  The city of Adelaide seemed so perfect it might have been dry- cleaned. We were two hours ahead of time and found a garage in Klemzig to do the muffler and perform a grease and oil change.

  I removed the Ardmona box from the back seat and felt my husband’s eyes upon me.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  Ah, I thought, you’re frightened.

  ‘Seeing a man about a dog,’ I said and he stood by the petrol bowser with his mouth open and watched as I hailed a taxi.

  Boom boom, I thought, to you.

  Of course the driver was excited to have a Redex driver in the car, not least because he recognised me. Mrs Titch, he said, but fortunately he had very little curiosity. What he wanted was to tell me about the three-quarter grind camshaft he was fitting to his car at home.

  Then this was Payneham where, as I would soon learn, Willie had loved the girl, at the back of these simple suburban cottages, between the Italian market gardens and this house from the phone book, with its screened in sleepout and its flowerbed and two long strips of concrete at the end of which an old Ford Prefect rested undisturbed.

  I could not say exactly why I was so pleased, but I knew I could take my little boy here and he would be well treated. I did not know what it meant to me, but when I finally walked down those double concrete paths beside the hydrangeas and saw the old pastor with his high wiry grey hair and his round wire glasses and that long and solemn chin, when I saw he was carrying mandarins in his hat I trusted him completely.

  2

  My sunburnt driver was like a long legged bird, forever poking at whatever worm or beetle passed his way. Perhaps he would turn out to be a ‘character’ or perhaps he would end up being a bore, but until we passed the roadhouse he had seemed curious and garrulous, ingenuous, provincial, friendly and it did not occur to me that I should fear him.

  ‘I’m not the navigator,’ he said. ‘That was meant to be your game.’

  ‘Can you take me back please?’

  He licked his lips and I thought of a dog, nervous, withdrawing from a fight. ‘I live in the here and now,’ he said. ‘But where are you?’

  ‘I’ve got business in Perth.’

  ‘Relax. You’re too young for business. You’re in the here and now. What’s that over there?’

  ‘You mean those hills? Could you slow down please?’

  ‘What you’re calling “those hills” are ancient coral reefs. That’s your “now” you’re not even seeing. Compared to this,’ said Garret Hangar, revealing sincere and agitated eyes, ‘Perth is nothing.

  You would have been bored in a day. This is for you,’ he said more gently. ‘Here, have another Lifesaver. There is nowhere like this down south. Did you talk to any human beings while you were in Broome?’

  Irene Bobs would not have tolerated him. Not Clover either. ‘An old Chinaman,’ I said.

  ‘Well how many old Chinamen did you know before?’ he said, surging forward, laying a great plume of yellow dust across the dreary scrub behind. He told me the Indonesians had sailed their prahu to Broome for hundreds of years. They had caught bêche-de-mer and smoked it on the beach. There were pearls and pearl shell. Japanese and Malays dived for it. The Chinamen traded it. The whitefellahs did all the usual business which included clubs that excluded all the dusky brethren. So that gave birth to a certain Sunshine Club. I should listen to Seaman Dan. He slowed a fraction and then sped up.

  ‘Saturday night at the Sunshine Club / Doing the waltz and the jitterbug,’ he sang. ‘Nothing like it anywhere. Hindus, Muslims, Christians. Sometimes they all live in one house together, men, women, children, all politely observing Ramadan and Christmas together. In Broome they can see your family history in your nose and earlobes. Why, man, you’re blushing. Did you have female company? Of course the whites might be nervous of you.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘No-one wants a throwback, do they?’

  ‘You mean a black child?’ I asked directly.

  ‘There are beautiful mulattos,’ he said urgently. ‘They’ll like you just to look at you. You’d be at home in Broome, blondie hair and all. You’re a fetching young fellow. They’ll go for you. The fair hair goes down a charm. And anyway. And anyway. The manager at Quamby Downs, you’ll meet him presently. He’s a blondie, pure merino, fresh from down south. Do you play cricket? Can you bowl?’

  ‘More of a spinner,’ I said. My mind was no longer in the car, but in Melbourne long ago as I saw the pity in the eyes of Adelina’s obstetrician.

  ‘He’ll love you,’ Garret said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Of course this one won’t last. Th
at type never do. But you get a good manager in place and everybody’s happy. You’ll be happy.

  There’s a million acres and fifty thousand cattle.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked and he somehow understood I was defeated.

  ‘You can travel for days and never leave the property,’ he said. ‘The blackfellahs will take you fishing and shooting. Lovely people.

  You’ll help them get bush tucker, they’ll be your friends for ever.

  Have you got a camera? You should get a camera. You should teach them proper English. No pidgin in the classroom, but you’ll love them, fabulous kids. You won’t believe the things you’ll see. Ask them to show you Geikie Gorge.’

  He did not tell me that the teacher at Quamby Downs station had suffered a nervous breakdown.

  By now the sun was at our backs as we wound in between the raw red bluffs that mark the entrance to the station and I was a plump ripe teacher, fresh from the south, someone readily acceptable to the sahibs in Perth.

  ‘This is one of the biggest cattle stations in the world.’

  ‘To which you are delivering your stationery?’

  ‘That’s it, chum.’

  We threaded our way between red iron outcrops and emerged on a vast overgrazed plain dotted with ant hills and divided by a single brutal line of fence. Ahead was a lonely tree like a huge fat-bellied jug, and beneath it was parked a car, the fire-blackened corpse of a once familiar Redex Peugeot, number 62. The back door swung open as we pulled up and from the wreck emerged a passenger.

  Doctor bloody Battery. Bloody hell. He limped to Garret’s open window and performed a mock salute.

  ‘I heard you gone walkabout,’ my driver said.

  Doctor Battery crouched at the window, waving flies away, looking off into the distance. ‘Back now, boss.’

  ‘You seen old Cricket?’

  The black man’s grimace suggested this was not to be desired. ‘Yeah see that fellah by and by.’

  ‘Maybe he let you fix my brakes?’

  ‘He say he shoot me next time.’

  ‘Maybe he growl that fellah.’