Shearers' Motel (7 page)

‘Spread a bucket of red dust on the floors, with star-shaped bindiis to wedge under guests' thongs. Rough-up a stack of
People, Australasian Post
, and
Rugby League Week
. Dump them on the end of the table for mealtime reading. Buy mattresses from St Vincent de Paul. Call it home.'

His mind raced, his biro plunged across a dozen pages of imagining.

‘Bertram Junior keeps mentioning the shearers' quarters at the Arid Zone Experimental Station, Red Rock Gorge, where I might, or might not, be cook next time.
Depends
, he says, looking away into the distance. He is always agonising about something. So I leave him to the privacy of his thoughts and imagine myself doing laps of the Red Rock pool while the lunchtime roast sizzles in the fan-forced oven, or I sprawl under a beach umbrella reading
Call Me When the Cross Turns Over
while dishes
rumble in the dishwasher, and my assistant cook, who Bertram Junior understands comes with the place and will certainly lend a hand, peels potatoes and quarters pumpkins ready for the night's grub-up.'

 

Between smoko and lunch one day, he drove down the track to Leopardwood Downs homestead and rang home. Sharon would have his letter by now. There didn't seem to be anyone there, but he waited. The phone always took a long time answering because Sharon was mostly outside, across at their own two-stand shed hammering over gaps in the iron, or laying stones in the garden, or up a ladder hauling lumber from the roofspace where she planned to build a loft with her own bare hands if finance wasn't forthcoming from somewhere. Or she would be sitting in the grass with the reins of her pony looped over her wrist, planning paddock rotations. Or maybe in town dropping the girls at school. What day was it there anyway? It was still early. Where was the place, he asked himself, that he couldn't even call home in his own mind — because of this impulse that was on him to travel, to shed parts of himself without thinking.

Sharon would certainly hear the phone if she was there. There was an outside bell. An electrically mounted arm with a lead ball at the end of a spring struck a dish-shaped iron ringer on the back verandah wall. It was deafening. The neighbours three kilometres away heard it when the air was still. Sharon never missed it. She'd fly from the saddle and come crashing in.

Like now.

‘I knew it would be you. Hang on. Let me get my breath. We got your letter, what an amazing life, isn't it chaotic? All that stuff about restaurants, are you serious? Wait a second.'

He heard the phone being put down, a cigarette being shaken out of a packet — heard the click of Sharon's lighter and the rapid intake of smoke as she gathered her thoughts. He imagined the way she touched the corner of her mouth with her thumbnail when she took the
cigarette out again, and then the way she ran the flat of her hand down the seam of her jeans as she positioned herself on the edge of the kitchen table, crossed her legs, looked pensive, calmer, more serious, less surface-sociable. ‘How
are
you?' Tossing her hair back from her face. Focusing on something outside, the poplars turning yellow through the kitchen window. ‘It's starting to get cold here,' she said. ‘What's it like there?'

‘Scorching.'

She gave news of the children. Marie's good marks in year ten but her deep unhappiness at the Central school. Ella's role in the year eight play: how serious she was, how lovely she looked in the costume that Marie, over a week of late nights, had designed, cut, and sewn for her. Then her own success at the Goulburn sales, where she got top price for a line of lambs, had he heard?

‘Have I heard? Way up here?'

‘Oh, you know what I mean.'

This was a habit of Sharon's, a verbal tic. Had people heard what they couldn't possibly have heard under any circumstances? He knew that. But automatically he responded, ‘How could I have
heard?
' — sounding testy when they were just renewing contact, distantly conscious but with the uncomfortable awareness growing that what this was about between them, whatever it was, wasn't going away, couldn't be covered by enthusiastic descriptive letters, weekly phone calls, overexplained absences, or by easy promises — which he now made — to be home by a certain date, Irene's fifth birthday party. ‘At the very latest,' he stressed, which would mean so much to her, he knew that, they both did — it was something they could agree on and talk about fondly for a while.

‘Well, anyway, Sharon, there's the twelve-minute beep. I'd better be getting back to the shed or I'll be skinned alive.'

Driving his yellow truck back to the quarters through the blond grass and past the stands of fragile leopardwoods he felt depressed. A plunging, stinging helplessness. People
who were chance encounters to him drew feeling from him, while those who loved him weren't getting what he had.

 

It was peaceful in the quarters with the shearers over at the shed. Work time snared him again. He leaned back on the kitchen sink, and kept falling asleep for instants of buzzy time. Every sound was clear and identifiable. Movement of wind, thump of heat-expanding tin, scrape of bird claws on the roof: you could dream the day through with those companionable, familiar, lulling noises, as long as you didn't have an inner clock pressing the back of your brain.

Today someone had left their radio going. Odd, he hadn't heard it earlier. He heard a time call. Then Slim Dusty. Anne Murray. Archie Roach. Willie Nelson.

Mentally he ran through the list for lunch: a roast shoulder, which he'd tear and hack into rib-portions, and serve with fresh rolls; plates of salad items — thawed lettuce, squashy red tomatoes, tinned beetroot, sweaty cheese, Fritz, sliced cucumber, pineapple rings.

There came the distinct sound of footsteps on the western side of the building. He looked out the door. Strange. Just the usual sight along there — a row of wireframed beds on the dirt, and Bertram Junior's Charger parked strategically, so the stereo could be heard from a reclining position, under the stars. Then on the other side of the shed he saw a pair of legs disappearing into the laundry. He went over. It was Louella, bent over the tubs, disconsolately heaving greasy shearers' denims up and down.

‘They sent me over to do their washin.'

‘Why'd they do that?'

She didn't answer. Just plunged into the washing again. Shearing denims were like no other kind of laundry, filthy with wool grease and dust, pizzle-smear and shit stain.

He walked back to the kitchen. He didn't have a clue. It was the last half-hour to dinner (as lunch was called).
Simplicity of the table — shiny green surface awaiting placement of bread board, lifting tongs, enamel dishes, tins of food with their tops removed, spoons at the ready. Something Alastair had told him that he was thrashing himself to achieve: ‘You've got to have boiling water in your sink, and everything you do, you wash up as you go. You dirty a pot, you wash a pot. As the people are bringing in and emptying their plates, you're not sitting down talking to them, you're washing the plates up. It's just one of those things, you've just got to plan your day, and you've got to plan your next day, what you're going to cook. And really you can see cooks chasing their tail, purely because they're not organised. But if they organise themselves it's absolutely magnificent what they sometimes can do.'

Alastair had told him that a cook could control a team if he was a smart cook and a good cook. ‘His existence is lonely, but he's one bloke who's not a member of the team in general, and people will talk to him in confidence.'

He felt about as effective as an ant. But as a touch of pride, had established a habit of laying the serving plates on sheets of newspaper. Today's tablecloth was made up of the executive employment pages of the
Sydney Morning Herald
. The meat was cooling under a flyproof cover. He couldn't put the salad out till just before noon because of the heat. The food was only just tepid in the fridges anyway (even fridge number three, crammed with lettuce and cauliflower, where everything had frozen at first, was running hot as candleflame). Heatwave conditions like this and there wouldn't be much eating done. He could tell that now.

He congratulated himself on judging quantities to the minimum. He didn't just want to be known as a good cook, he wanted to be a cheap cook. The heat was on his side. It was cooking for appearances.

Jugs of cordial crammed with ice were plonked on the mess table. A lot of thought had gone into selecting the colour combination — lemon at one end, lime at the
other. The ammoniated odour of Spray'N'Wipe over everything was like a nudge in the ribs — this cook was clean. He started to think about the next shed. He saw his truck moving south, into a cooler landscape, coming under the shadow of a raincloud on a sealed road. He saw steam rising from bitumen, and he lay back with his mouth open, his eyes closed.

Minutes away from twelve and the table arrangement was a symmetry of tinplate. Only one last thing needed — a chilled tin of beetroot. So out to the fridge to get it.

Louella was sitting at the table, legs straddling the bench seat, lighting up a Marlboro, tears in her eyes. He hadn't heard anyone come in.

‘I jes don't believe it.'

She turned her cigarette packet over and over on the bench seat between her fingertips. Her tears were huge, dark silver. Her crying came with a jagged breath that originated somewhere deeper than her lungs, a big physical heave, a convulsion.

‘They went n sacked me.'

This was the same Louella who had been taunting Barbara from under stubborn brows only an hour ago, as she clutched her broom and trudged around the board and by every gesture and curl of her lip implied eat shit.

‘Has it ever happened before?'

‘Never in me whole life.'

‘What happens now?'

‘They'll drive me t'Bourke, I s'pose. I'm broke,' her big brown eyes lifted to meet his. No one would be leaving the shed till the weekend. That was three days off. ‘Then I'll catch the bus back to the Hill. Harold will find another shed for me. He's a good one, Harold. Yeah, Harold'll look after me. He don't take no shit.'

‘Will you have to pay a mess-bill for the days you don't work?'

Louella shrugged. ‘Depends.'

‘Can you cook?'

‘A bit,' she brightened.

‘Well, come on, give me a hand in the kitchen. You can be my assistant.'

Louella wiped a tear away with the sleeve of her shirt. ‘Whatcha want done?'

He gave her a tin of beetroot, and told her to empty it into a dish. She wound the lid off, upended 750 grams from a height of half a metre. ‘Oops!' as half of it splashed to the tabletop, the rest slithering to the floor. ‘I guess I ain't much of a cook,' as she cleaned up the mess. He took over with a Chux.

‘Come back after lunch. I'll put you to work with a broom.'

‘I can use a broom, for sure.'

‘I'll sling you a few bucks.'

‘You don't have ta,' she smiled. ‘Just call it quits on them batteries you gave me.'

The shearers arrived, filling the room with heavy silence punctuated only by ‘What's this, mate?' … ‘Some of that, thanks.' Bertram Junior came in, unusual for him. He said from the corner of his mouth, ‘Me and Louella and Willie-boy won't be in for tea'.

With the others milling around he expected Louella to disappear back to her room, to hide her face in shame, in anger. Then he saw that he knew nothing about sackings and hirings in the sheds, or about necessity and lack of choice in this life. You made your stand, you felt the emotion. But you couldn't make it the end of the world. You couldn't afford to. Louella sat at the table, smoking, drinking cordial, picking at a cold beetroot hamburger she'd slung together, and gossiping in a listless fashion with the others the way people always did at the lunchtime mess table, when they were stunned by the day's noise, motion, action, and only wanted to stay still because of the ringing in their ears. They stared at the walls. They lapped cordial. They almost panted in short breaths, it was so hot.

The afternoon wore on. Tiredness hit like metal poisoning. Cleaning up after lunch, he stepped clear of Louella's broom as she went slowly, dreamily into
corners and crevices, getting out dust that had accumulated for years.

After a while he asked her: ‘Do you like working in the sheds?'

Louella leant on her broom. ‘I hate em,' dragging the words out as if each one was chained to a concrete block. ‘I-really-and-truly-hate-em.'

‘What would you rather do?'

Louella looked into the distance for a minute. ‘The thing is, when I'm away from the sheds, I miss em?'

She rested the broom on the wall. Wandered away.

A while past afternoon smoko Willie-boy came into the kitchen with steely purposefulness. ‘Where's Louella? We're taking her to Bourke.' He found Louella in her room, ‘Get packed, Lou.' He sat at the wheel of Bertram Junior's car, impatiently tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, radio going full blast, while Louella trudged back and forth, slinging her bags into the back. ‘Jesus, hurry up, will you?' Then she got into the back seat at last, and Willie-boy turned the key. The motor wouldn't start. Swearing between his teeth he marched over to the shed and back, fetching jumper leads, while Louella stayed where she was, focused on the horizon.

At last Willie-boy and Bertram Junior roared off in a dust cloud, with Louella, plaything of the gods, on the back seat of the car unhappily clutching her luggage. In Bourke they left her ‘outside the worst Abo pub in town' and went hunting for a replacement. He had a vision of the girl moving from one town to the next, set adrift, abandoned in the life.

‘She's on her own now, Cookie. Fuck her.'

‘The only trouble about Red Rock Gorge, Cookie, is that every man and his dog wants to shear there, because of it being luxurious. That swimming pool is a major drawcard. I worry that my brother has taken the job away from me while we've been up here with our various troubles. He's got his own permanent cook, worst luck for you, eh.'

Bertram Junior met his eye with his watery brown gaze, and shook his head in a kind of sorrow.

‘But won't you need a cook at your next shed, even if it's not Red Rock Gorge?'

‘That remains to be seen. See, Cookie, we might be going down to Hay.'

‘Hay?'

‘There's a place coming up that another contractor reneged on. Alastair's trying to get it. An eight-stander.' Bertram Junior brightened at the thought. ‘Get that one, Cookie, and you'd be on contract, working your arse off but I reckon you could handle it, and the money would be unreal. You'd have your thousand a week, or close to.'

‘Well, give it to me, then.'

‘Hmm. I am thinking of your missus. Is Hay close to your home?'

‘A lot closer than this.'

‘Trouble is, they've got too many cooks down there that work local,' said Bertram Junior with a feeling intonation, as if this was something he had only just realised, and passionately wished it were otherwise.

It was the first time Hay had been mentioned as a possibility. He wondered how long Bertram Junior had known about it. Maybe the whole time here at Leopardwood Downs and from before. The shearers' motel idea was nothing more than the next shed, better than the last one. Cold beer at smoko and cooks for the cooks, air-conditioned rooms and inner-spring mattresses, chlorinated water, a video library of wrestling classics and Terminator movies, a pool table, a basketball hoop, and steak instead of mutton all the time. ‘Maybe you could do us a poolside barbecue in the Weber cooker they've got there, then another night to give you a break we could lay down a hangi — how about that?'

‘I'd like to see a hangi some time,' he admitted.

‘Let's make it definite, then,' nodded Bertram Junior before going downbeat again. ‘Only trouble is, for a hangi, the rocks out that way ain't the right type. They crack up in the heat. You're better off using railway ties or an engine block. The thing is there, that Red Rock Gorge's got no rubbish lying around, on account of it's a government operation — they've got plenty of labour. Just wait till we get down to Lilypad Station, though.'

‘Where's that?'

‘In Victoria.'

‘We're going there?'

‘It's one of Alastair's sheds. They've got volcanic rocks almost as good as back home. They shear in October.'

‘It's only February now.'

‘You're not wrong,' said Bertram Junior after a long pause. ‘You're getting the picture of how this operates, Cookie,' he added in a kind of bitterly honest outburst.

 

He thought that weaving phantoms in the air might have been a technique Bertram Junior had picked up from
Clean Team Alastair in order to keep workers on strength till the end of a shed. He had heard a lot about contracting from Davo. ‘You've got to be able to tell the greatest whoppers ever. Alastair would nearly be the champion liar. He says, “There's this shed out here and it's all lambs and ewes”. He gets all these shearers and they go out and there's these great wethers. He might have a couple of teams going at one time, and with the great shortage of shearers he'll come up and promise five shearers in one place and six shearers in another place and he might send two out to each place. “These other fellows are coming, they mightn't get there till morning.” But they are never coming.

‘When I did it for a while, gawd,' admitted Davo, ‘I lied my head off — had to — and just hoped all the bullshit I spouted matched up when the shed started.'

One day Davo said: ‘In relation to contracting and guys like Bertram Junior, bullshit matches their Maori thing.'

‘What Maori thing?'

‘The bullshitting propensity. Lying is one of their big things, you know, if you're a good liar then it's kudos. Like Bertram Junior staying up all night to do the paperwork. Like the way he said you were slacking off all the time. And the fact that you're an alcoholic, and your marriage is bust, and you haven't got a farm at all.'

‘I haven't?'

‘He'd like to see it. Then there's the way he gets a rise out of you every time he mentions waiting outside the high school for your daughters. He was watching you when they slung Louella in the car and shot her into Bourke.'

‘That was pretty bad. Willie-boy went right off the map.'

Davo shrugged. ‘Not as bad as it looked.'

‘She's only seventeen, for Chrissakes.'

‘She's from a hard place. The babies over there get hung in baskets over the wool table while the mothers work. They're into rousing from a young age. It's that or school, and the rest follows. It all happens at the deep end.
Why do you think they come over to Australia? It's not too hot in Kiwi. Anyway, they stick together. That's their thing too.'

‘Bertram Junior said he wasn't ever going to employ Louella again, and he said Harold felt the same way. Then they just dumped her outside the Post Office Hotel.'

‘She'd have friends there, for sure. You watch. She's family. They'll look out for Lou by remote control. I don't feel too sorry for her after the way she stuck it up Barb. Arrgh, yeah, I suppose I do — I mean, I understand why she's like she is, anyway. The next shed you work at I'll bet she'll be there, coming into the kitchen past mealtime as usual and giving you that big beautiful smile you're a sucker for. This is the Kiwi work machine, mate — a subsection of the Australian shearing industry. Parts of the machine that don't function get replaced. That's a fact. If they repair themselves they get tried again. Third chances come harder. It might happen to anyone. It'll happen to you one day.'

‘What will?'

‘You'll get sacked.'

Davo took a drag on his roll-your-own, narrowed his gaze and looked at him appraisingly, as if when it came to the crunch he could just as easily be the one doing the sacking, no worries.

‘What for — my cooking?'

Everyone had praised his cooking and he had the feeling he'd excelled.

‘For sure.'

‘So where do I fall down?' he asked tightly.

‘You don't get it, do you,' said Davo, shaking his head and smiling as if at the stubbornness of a well-loved child. ‘One day you'll cut the tomatoes the wrong way. Or you'll put onion in the mashed potato. Or you won't. It doesn't matter what. Blame the stars.'

‘Bloody old Alastair got me all the way out here, and now he'll send me all the way back without putting me on somewhere else? It's crazy economics. It's about twenty-five hundred k's return trip. That's some way to run a business.'

‘He's not paying,' shrugged Davo. ‘You're the one wanting work. You're just a little strip of paper on an organiser board. Face it. Maybe now he'll just move you up a notch or two, when he hears you're okay.'

‘If he hears.'

‘He will. But whether it makes any difference or not, who knows.'

‘I've still got my own transport,' he said conclusively.

‘Spot-on,' said Davo. ‘You know something.'

 

Rain was coming in sheep country. Each night for the past few days the horizon had been lit by sunken lightning flashes — with gusts of gritty, cooling air spilling through the space between the huts and the wash-house, marking a change from the terrible heat that had gripped the place when Louella was sacked, and Old Jake and the two Kiwi imports, Christian T and Pam, had left for Boulia. These two hadn't been natural allies but they were thrown together, and did things in tandem, even their thinking.

Christian T and Pam had not been able to imagine anywhere in the world hotter than Leopardwood Downs: the name Boulia apparently suggested to them a bubble of coolness, when in fact Boulia was way up north, almost as far north as sheep went in this country, one of the hottest towns in a hot State, Queensland. Maybe a contractor had lied to them, and Old Jake, who had shorn around Boulia for many seasons, kept quiet about it because he wanted company on the long drive — although more likely it was his stone deafness that only made him smile when they strutted their ignorance.

‘Is Boulia far from the beach?' Christian T had wondered. ‘Can you get to Brisbane from Boulia for the weekend?' they wanted to know. The answer was yes, ‘If you drive two days and two nights without stopping'.

Their replacements came. They were two shearers, Lenny and Flash, and a woman rouseabout, Rosie, a friend of Louella's. Clean Team Alastair paid for their petrol and lent them his car so that Maurie Holgate would hire his team again next year. ‘When the chips are down,'
said Bertram Junior, ‘it comes to PR.' They bounced into the camp at the end of breakfast one morning, just as the rest of the team disappeared over to the shed — wheeling up in Alastair's Fairlane, having driven all night ahead of storms dumping two hundred, two fifty millimetres of rain behind them on floodplains and stormwater drains, on lignum flats and stony ranges, on riverside gullies and desolate overgrazed paddocks and miserable homesteads across an area the size of the United Kingdom. It rained at places where there had been no rain in a year, but nothing fell at Leopardwood Downs. Storms that had cut across from the centre of the continent and shafted down into the southeastern country had left Leopardwood Downs with its shearing prospects intact.

‘You've no idea what's coming,' said Lenny. ‘We want to shear these buggers and clear out. Otherwise we're stuck here. How many are left?'

He told them: about four thousand.

Lenny clapped a hand to his forehead: ‘
What
?'

Flash said, ‘Bullshit.'

Rosie said, ‘What's that, a full week?'

‘As good as,' said Lenny as he rinsed his plate in the sink. ‘Fucking Alastair lied to us again: “Zip up, zip back, clear the backlog in a couple of days”. I am going to tear that man's throat out.' He turned from the sink with a smile. ‘At least we've got ourselves a chef in the kitchen, eh?'

Lenny was a balding Kiwi shearer approaching forty with a permanent tigerish smile and a yellowing fag on his lower lip, a sweat-towel around his neck and a stubby in his hand the moment work was finished. ‘Bertram Junior giving you plenty of tongue, is he, Cookie? It's his way of trying to make you do better, when fuck me, you're fucking fine.'

Lenny wore a shearing singlet that said:

My philosophy is quite simple
If I can't eat it
Or screw it
I'll piss on it

Flash was a twenty-six year old South Australian shearer who was happy all the time, foul-mouthed, spirited. He had fallen out with Davo and Barb at an earlier shed over something that none of them would mention, but which made them guarded in each other's company. There had already been one clash in this shed, Barb versus Louella: no one wanted another, especially if rains were coming and there was a chance of being stuck.

‘Hey, mate,' Flash called to Maurie Holgate as he went past the wash-house one day, ‘Do something about the shaving mirror in there, will you, it's a bloody disgrace'.

It was the shed life as it was lived. The cook was in it: Lenny, Flash and Rosie found him in it. ‘I'm only a shearer, just a fucking shearer,' sang Lenny as he finished his breakfast that first day and went up to the shed an hour late, and rang the board.

Rosie was shy. When he asked her what her feelings were about Louella being dumped she said, ‘Thet gel's hopeless when I'm not around to watch her, thet's the truth, Cookie'.

Lenny always thanked him for his meals, regularly saying at mealtimes, ‘This little lot exceeds your usual high standard, Cookie'. He was developing a philosophy of appreciation: ‘What's this shit, Cookie,' was worth something as irony, while anyone who came back for a second helping, even if they didn't say a word, could be considered grateful.

‘Unbeatable shit,' Flash would pronounce, surveying the serving table. ‘Unbeatable eatable shit.'

The hostility between Flash and Davo was so guarded it could seem like politeness. Eyeing a meaty shank, which they both favoured, each would wait for the other to take it first, or would pass it up altogether.

‘Arrgh, leave it for the dogs.'

They could agree on that.

 

Cut-out night. Last night at Leopardwood Downs.

He located the largest cooking pots he could find,
boiled two huge legs of Leopardwood Downs mutton, served them with cabbage and boiled potatoes, and made candied carrots and mashed pumpkin. The weather was cooler, appetites were up from work, the team dug in with their forks and spoons, and there was plenty to eat. The potatoes glistened with melted margarine. There was a dish of mustard. Mint sauce. The carrots lay on their serving dish as if lacquered. For dessert there were two shortcrust pastry pies striped with jelly and custard, one red, one green, and a row of leftover UHT cream cartons (a previously rationed luxury) all chilled down to near-coolness with their tops angle-cut ready for piping out. The technique was to twist the cardboard as if throttling a quail.

It was party-time — although nothing like the wild end-of-shed frenzies he had heard about, that were like apocalyptic roads to destruction from all accounts. He would preside over one of those before he finished this work, he told himself — if he ever got another job. He would clear the tables out of the mess-room and dance with Louella and Rosie till his joints ached, dance with Barb and roar good-natured abuse at Davo, and tell Bertram Junior where to put it, and Bertram Junior would glare his ‘I'll get you, Cookie' glare, and there would be no more divisions between people.