Landscape of Farewell (7 page)

‘Some people need advice.’

I walked with her to the security barrier. Before she went through she embraced me, holding me strongly against her ample body. With her mouth close to my ear she whispered, ‘Take care, Uncle Max!’ She released me and turned and walked through the barrier. On the other side, she looked back and waved and blew me a kiss.

I waved and stood watching until she was out of sight. Professor Vita McLelland, the black princess of the barbarous
new order. I missed her the moment she was gone. I turned away and went in search of the Peugeot. I had no idea where in the vast car park I had left it. It didn’t seem to matter greatly. If I couldn’t find it, I would take a taxi home and save myself the anxiety of the drive. I stood looking along the endless ranks of parked cars thinking about her. She had insisted that we were friends and that our friendship mattered to her. I was grateful to her and was shamed by my timidity, by the fragility of my morale. I realised I no longer felt alone. The image of the old man crossing the road in the rain suddenly rose up before me, and I silently apologised to him for having hated him for that moment. I saw then that I was standing next to the Peugeot.

Mount Nebo was the name of the remote township in the ranges of the Central Highlands of Queensland where Vita’s uncle, Dougald Gnapun, lived. Despite its name, I could see no mountain from the summit of which I might expect to catch a glimpse of the Promised Land before I died. Indeed the silence of the township, and the low grey scrub surrounding it, was so unnatural that I felt as if I had arrived at the moment of stillness after the end of the world.

Vita and I had seen no one when we drove into town along the forlorn main street. It was late in the afternoon and the shops were empty, the buildings apparently abandoned, their yards and sideways neglected and overgrown with weeds and small bushes. There was not a vehicle nor a pedestrian to be seen. The
only sign of life was a Shell service station at a crossroads, and even this had the appearance of being temporarily unattended.

A kilometre or two back along the road in from the coast Vita had pointed out the towers and gantries of a coal mine. ‘That’s what killed the town,’ she told me. ‘They built their own residential compound and stores. It’s all air-conditioned. So who needs the town?’

As I stood there beside Dougald and his three dogs at the side gate of his house watching Vita drive into the distance in her bright little hire car, I realised that it must be the throbbing of the machinery of the mine that I could hear. It was a sound that emphasised the uncanny stillness within which we were encompassed. Then a rooster crowed nearby. It was as if a signal had been given to begin, but nothing stirred.

When Vita’s car was lost to our sight over a distant rise, Dougald continued to stand looking down the road. Did he expect her to return and to announce that she had forgotten something or that she had changed her mind and had decided to stay with us? The dogs knew better, however, and lost interest in the vigil. Standing there in the perfect stillness beside Dougald, the fine red dust of Vita’s departure drifting between us and the sinking sun, the expectant silence of the landscape seemed to open around me and I experienced a sense of anticipation. I looked at Dougald. He smiled, as if he took my meaning. Then he picked up my suitcase and carried it into the house.

I followed him. He was not the fierce square-jawed axe-wielding Scot that I had imagined, but a gentle, large-bodied man of my own age, a widower for considerably longer than I, soft looking and considered in his movements. He was darker than Vita, a good head taller than me, and, as I was soon to discover, inhabited a deep and very private silence of his own—as some poet has expressed it,
listening to his own depth
. His small, square, unpainted fibro-cement house was set on an irregular fenced block of land in alignment with the dusty gravel road on the extreme edge of the town, isolated from other dwellings. The house was not more than two hundred metres from the river and the commencement of the low grey scrub that extended to the horizon in all directions beyond the town’s perimeters, except to the south, where softly rounded hills, or small mountains—among them, perhaps, the Mount Nebo of the town’s name—broke the monotony of the level horizon line. I did not know then that these modest hills could only be seen for a short time after sunrise each morning and in the evening, when the atmosphere was clear of the ochreous haze that otherwise obscured any distant prospect during the heat of the day.

The room to which Dougald showed me was a small cell with a narrow uncurtained window which looked onto the empty road. A single bed stood against the wall beside the window. Next to the bed there was an upended wooden crate of the kind that had
been in service when I was a boy and which might once have contained a dozen bottles, of beer perhaps or soft drink. It was the only object in the room with which I felt the faintest kinship of familiarity. Opposite the door there was a varnished cupboard, its single door hanging open. Dougald set down my suitcase beside the bed and went over to the cupboard and closed its door. He turned and looked at me. Behind him the door of the wardrobe silently swung open again.

‘If there’s anything you need, old mate,’ he said, his voice soft and encouraging. He might have been welcoming me back to this room after a period of absence. He took out his mobile telephone and frowned at it, perhaps reading a message, or considering sending one.

I thanked him and said the room would do fine and that I would let him know if I needed anything. ‘Where is the bathroom?’ I asked.

He led me back through the kitchen and out onto the square of concrete behind the house. He indicated an enclosed water-tank stand. ‘The shower’s in there. She’s not too bad this time of year.’ He turned and pointed towards the back of the yard. A path through the grass led to a wire enclosure in which a dozen or so brown hens and a rooster were penned. Beside the hen run there was a narrow shed constructed of timber slabs with a door at the front. The door of this modest building, like the door of the wardrobe, hung open. ‘That’s the toilet,’ he said. Behind the
toilet, beyond the back fence, was an open field in which three large yellow bulldozers, rusting and overgrown with creepers, had evidently been abandoned. ‘See them tall trees? The river’s down there,’ he said, pointing. ‘She’s not much just now. We haven’t had any decent rains this year.’ He examined the screen of his telephone again. He seemed to be expecting a call.

Alone in the small bare room that was to be mine for the duration of my visit, I stood at the window and looked along the deserted road. I had not felt so abandoned to strangeness since the day my mother left me at my uncle’s farm when I was a boy. If Vita had still been with us, I would have carried my suitcase out to her car and sat in the passenger seat with my arms folded and insisted she drive me back to civilisation.
I have nothing against your uncle. Indeed, he seems to be a most sympathetic man. But why, Vita, why have you brought me to this place?
The peculiar feeling of anticipation that I had experienced for a moment while standing outside with Dougald was gone. I listened for the sound of the mine machinery, but I could not make it out from inside the house. I suddenly realised I was exhausted. We had travelled for hours in the car over rough roads after leaving the airport at the coastal town and my back was aching, the pain going down into my left hip. I examined the bed linen. The sheets were freshly laundered and the blanket smelled pleasantly of wool. I realised it was new. The pillow, too, was generous and soft, its white case still creased from its first unfolding. The smell of
the bed was of fresh linen and home. I had not expected it, and felt a flood of gratitude towards Dougald for this consideration. I took off my shoes and lay on the bed, my arms by my sides. My left leg throbbed steadily from the referred pain in my spine. I gave a small groan and closed my eyes.
My dearest, you do not know where I am.

A ground mist hovered like a softly levitating bed sheet above the open field beyond the hen run, the abandoned bulldozers a looming family of dreaming pachyderms. All was silent, except for the distant throbbing of the mine. Dougald and I were at the back fence. He had fed the hens and I had collected seven warm brown eggs from their boxes.

‘We’d better shift her peg,’ he said. His voice caressed the words, as if he spoke in order to listen to himself, in order to hear a human voice in this place. Lifting his hand, he pointed at the freckle-faced nanny-goat. She had cropped almost to the earth the growth of weeds and grasses within the compass of her tether.

Dougald’s pace was unhurried and the sun was well up and the day already warm by the time we returned to the house. While he cooked breakfast, I sat at the kitchen table leafing through a collection of old newspapers and magazines. He had set his mobile phone down among a confusion of documents and a laptop computer which occupied the end of the table nearest
the door. I wondered what business it was that occupied him here in this out-of-the-way place on the edge of the wilderness. He set down a plate of eggs, bacon and toast on the table in front of me, then brought his own and sat down. We were seated side by side facing the open door, as if we were twins or old brothers, the view of the patch of concrete and the antique gum tree before us, the sunlit yard and outbuildings beyond, the goat grazing her new range contentedly.

We ate our breakfast in silence, as if we were about to embark upon some hazardous enterprise. During breakfast Dougald received two calls on his mobile telephone. He rose from the table each time with a soft apology and took the phone and stood with it at the back door, murmuring into it in such a low voice he might have been conversing with the dead. He said nothing to me of these calls but set the telephone aside when he was done and resumed his breakfast. I was sensitive of my status as a newly arrived guest in his house and did not feel at liberty to question him about his situation. I was curious, nevertheless, to know why he had remained in this town, since it had been abandoned by most of its other inhabitants. Had he stayed on from an attachment to his ancestral country?

From his self-enclosed manner I took it that he had no particular wish to speak about himself. He seemed content with the silence between us. It was not in the least an awkward silence. In fact I do not recall ever being so at ease with a new
acquaintance in such a close domestic situation as I was in those early days with Dougald. His silence was a contrast to Vita’s unceasing flow of conversation, which I had found tiring after a few days with her in Sydney. Everything Vita felt, she felt intensely. There were no half-measures with her. At the end of each day with her at the conference I had retired to my hotel room with a headache. She had promised to return to Mount Nebo for me in a week or two, and had repeated her assurance that her uncle would take me to see his country.

His dog, a pale-eyed wolf-like bitch, waited in attendance at the side of his chair, and every so often he offered her a morsel of bacon, which she nipped delicately from between his fingers with her bared front teeth, her ears laid back along her narrow skull. She did not beg or demand these favours, but was fastidious and correct, waiting patiently, her tail sweeping from side to side, her gaze steady on his right hand. She was satisfied with her master’s generosity and confident it would not arbitrarily be withdrawn. The two brown dogs, her offspring and members of her tribe, made no attempt to enter the house, but stood in the open doorway looking in enviously at their privileged mother, lifting their snouts and sniffing the air. When I finished my breakfast I went over to them and gave them the fat from my bacon, which they greatly appreciated.

I took my own and Dougald’s plates to the sink and set about washing the accumulation of dirty dishes and pans that had
obviously been piled there for some time. There were old scraps of food and half-eaten pieces of mouldy toast among the dishes. While I did the washing-up, Dougald made several phone calls. As he talked he walked back and forth across the small space of the kitchen, from the cupboards to the open doorway then back again, looking down at his feet all the while, and might have been a prisoner measuring the confines of his cell. He was observed closely all the while by his grey bitch. She stood forward on her trembling forelegs, eager for a sign from him, her pale eyes never leaving his face. The two brown dogs lost interest in the goings-on in the kitchen once they saw there was no more food to be had. They sat at their ease out in the yard in the shade of the great broken gum tree, their forepaws crossed, their attention on the goat, which had managed to force its head through the wire fence and was attempting to reach a tall blue thistle growing just beyond the range of its tether rope. The larger of the two dogs gave a low woof every now and then and glanced towards the kitchen, wishing to reassure us that it was not just idling but was on duty. Dougald had not named his dogs and asked nothing of them, not issuing them with either commands or reprimands.

The day was warm and still outside, and in the kitchen there was the domestic clatter of the dishes as I set them aside on the draining board, behind me the low murmur of Dougald’s voice as he spoke into his telephone. The plain white dishes in my hands and the feel of the warm suds on my fingers
insisted upon an intimate acknowledgment of homeliness and familiarity. Scrubbing at the remains of burned food that clung to the insides of the pots, I found it difficult to recall with any certainty the conditions of my former life. I turned from the sink and looked towards Dougald. He caught my look and smiled. It was a slow, gracious, kindly, amused smile that drew up the loose folds of his cheeks and formed deep recesses and wrinkles around his eyes. There was much in his smile of understanding, and much was communicated to me of a sensitive response in him to our situation together in his home. I returned his smile. It was surely our amusement that we acknowledged, this vision of ourselves as two old men together at the end of their days. We might indeed have been brothers who had never married but had remained in the modest family home long after the deaths of our parents, I assuming the role of housekeeper, and he that of breadwinner.