Shearers' Motel (9 page)

‘I like you, Bertram Junior. You've got charisma.'

Outside the post office in Bourke, Bertram Junior came over with a grin: ‘Hang on in there, Cookie. They might want you in Hay after all.'

 

He held the wheel lightly, watching stars drift across the windscreen and feeling warm night air fan his face. The rains had been down this way. The earth smelled damp and easy. All the long drive down sealed roads to the Clean Team headquarters, a town of glittering lights, where they arrived long after dark, it seemed to him that the work would be there when they took a dogleg turn down south, and travelled on more sealed roads through rained-on country into the Riverina.

He pitched his tent beside a willow tree in the municipal caravan park. He took a change of clothes down to the ablution block and showered. Luxuriating with a bar of Pears' soap, he worked on the pervasive filth of weeks. Soft town water did what hard bore water never could. He shampooed, rinsed, and shampooed again, picking what seemed like pebble-sized pieces of grit from his scalp. He felt drunk with the benefit of it all. Pulling on clean trousers, buttoning a stiff, sun-dried shirt, he saw how the flat, bright fluorescent light peered into every clean corner and gleamed back from each shiny surface.

He unloaded his plastic cook's chair, and put it on the grass next to his tent. He smeared on Rid and drank a stubby, stretching his legs out, knowing there was nothing to do after this except what he wanted to do.

He went over to the phone booth that stood in a puddle of light beside the gravelled drive, and rang home. He would be back there late afternoon the next day. He had Irene's birthday present in his pocket — a news-agency toy from Nevertire. There was confusion in Sharon's voice when he said there might be another job to go to almost immediately, that he would know about it by the time he reached home. Not Red Rock Gorge but in the Riverina. He kept talking as if anything he decided was okay by her — steamrollering his way to the next shed with home just a place to touch in passing.

Then he got back in his truck and drove to a different part of town, to the motel strip on the eastern, highway side, where he called into a bottle shop, bought his cook's shout, and drove around the corner to a rendezvous.

 

Everyone was in the pool at the Golden Horseshoe Motel when he came walking in with a carton of VB stubbies under his arm. Bertram Junior hauled out of the water with the news. ‘It seems like they've had all the rain they need round Hay and it's rooted the shearing,' he said dolefully. ‘Alastair wants us to shear suburban out of here for a while, and you know what that means, don't you, Cookie.'

He nodded. ‘Cut lunches. No cooks.'

‘Fraid so.'

‘Where will you guys live?'

‘That's the good thing,' Bertram Junior's eyes shone. ‘Here in the motel.'

 

Leaning on the pool fence, he watched people he knew rippling through the low-lit greenish-blue water, wallowing in the warm evening air, backstroking, belly-flopping, Lenny slicking like an eel, Rosie spinning like a corkscrew, Flash doing butterfly, Willie-boy floating, holding a drink in one hand and paddling softly with the other. Stars flicked from water to sky as the shearers forgot who they were.

‘Ain't this the life, Cookie?'

‘Seems like it is.'

‘Come on in, then, ya bastard. It's be-yootiful.'

The figures in the pool seemed remote and privileged to him, like figures in a dream. He couldn't connect to them the way he had before, even so recently as a few hours ago, back up the track to Leopardwood Downs. An understanding between them had been cut. Now they were part of a pattern that wasn't his. They came back into this pattern all the time but he didn't. He couldn't affect them with his labour any more. He felt dislodged from the dream — cast out. He was hurt that Bertram Junior and his brother hadn't found him another shed, even though he knew that was stupid of him. He kept looking over his shoulder for Alastair, hoping for a scrap of paper with a roughly drawn map, a telephone number, a new start. But it wasn't Alastair's fault either.

‘Alastair's up at the Bowls Club,' said Bertram Junior, ‘playing night comp. The boys left the car for him there. You don't interrupt him at the club, though I think Davo's planning to if he gets into town in time. He's got a few points to make, bloody Davo.'

He split the carton, setting it up on a poolside table. ‘Hoe in.' He passed a bottle of Diet Fanta to Bertram Junior. ‘It's on me. To my first overseer.' He took a beer
for himself. ‘Cheers,' he raised the stubby. But felt depressed, thinking his own thoughts while the rest of them laughed and roared, giggled and gave chase, bombed and sprawled.

He thought he wasn't getting what he wanted, and would get what he wanted only if he was really game — if he risked enough. There was a stubbornness in him, he decided, a resistance, a deeper alienation than anyone knew. He drew back from immersing himself in the life while stating he wanted it; he could never fall on the blade; he wasn't broken enough to match the imagery of ruination he carried inside. He had let it go. He must have — otherwise he would just camp in the caravan park until another job came up instead of going home in the morning.

‘A motel room's expensive, isn't it?' he turned to Bertram Junior.

‘Oh, no, not if you divide it six ways.'

He did a quick headcount. ‘Six?' There were only five. Bertram Junior nodded towards a thatched poolside shelter. Someone was in there. He walked over. It was Louella. She was sitting in the shadows drinking Bailey's Irish Cream straight from the bottle. She was wearing a pale blue one-piece swimsuit, her hair tied back in a chignon. She wore a crimson bougainvillea flower at the side of her head. She moved her face into the light: and the slow, hypnotised way she did it told him how she had got there from Bourke. It hadn't been by bus or by hitching, or by getting lifts from shed to shed with friends and acquaintances, or by being collected and given rides by stock agents or wool brokers associated with Clean Team Alastair. It had been by working a feeling. That was all. That was everything. Louella had materialised into the life following a pattern that had nothing to do with the hard, head-breaking rules of daytime in the sheds. It was a pattern she could connect with it whenever she chose, settling in with utter languorousness. Maybe she wouldn't be given work for a while, but she had a place. Somewhere to eat and somewhere to sleep. It was there for her
whenever she tipped back her head and slippery-slided in from the outer. Here it was, a version of paradise: a motel, another shed, all these lights, the guys, and her best friend Rosie.

She gave him a slow, lovely smile as she lit a cigarette, took it from her lips, and blew out the match.

‘Ay, Cookie, how are ya. Never thought I'd see you down thes way. They got a shed for you? They haven't yet? Thet's too sad.'

His truck came squeaking and rattling across the soft hills, through the pale blue haze of the home district sky, down past the poplars, across the creek, and up to the silver-roofed farmhouse under the old ribbon gums.

The truck seemed to get its second wind there. It wouldn't sink to the earth just now, it seemed. It went once around the turning circle near the walnut trees, gave a final choking roar of cylinders, and came to a halt facing the way out, down towards the dip of the track over the creek, aligning with the dirt road over the green hills again.

The house was forty years old, and he had lived there for ten years, but he felt as if he had never seen it before. It looked newly made after the desolation of Leopardwood Downs. The roof-iron was bright silver and the guttering was choked with golden poplar leaves. The people who lived here were strangers. A doll's pram lay overturned on the path. A billowing wash filled the clothesline. He leaned on the horn to announce himself.

The dogs came pelting out, the whippet and the German coulie yapping around the truck where hordes of station dogs and shearers' dogs had cocked a leg, getting themselves excited.

He climbed from the truck and flung the dogs off with a yell. ‘Anyone home?'

No answer. Nobody anywhere. A stab of disappointment that everyone wasn't all over him like a rash. Windows open to the breeze. A flap of plastic scraping the exposed timbers of the loft space. A cement mixer from Elbo's Hire down at the garden wall, where piles of granite boulders and a sledgehammer made a still life of Sharon's morning. Up on the bare ridge he saw her Nissan. She would have been following him all the way on the road in, without either of them realising it — or just without him realising it. The Nissan jerked closer and he could hear the grind of the diesel engine, see Marie and Ella sitting dangerously on the roof-rack waving coloured sweaters and calling out as the vehicle dipped and disappeared into the creek-crossing. He wanted to be found sitting nonchalantly on the verandah, his nose in a book, a dog dreaming at his feet as if he'd never been away anywhere. Looking up — ‘Where have
you
all been?'

 

They said he stank of mutton fat.

‘Like a greasy chop.'

‘A cigarette butt.'

‘A stale beer can.'

‘A warm roast.'

‘I want my present,' demanded Irene. He reached into his pocket and produced a sun-bleached plastic news-agents' doll about as big as his thumb, with a key ring through its topknot and a whistle-hole between its two pink ballerina's feet.

‘Wow!'

 

Marie and Ella stared at him while he told them about girls barely older than they were working in the sheds. Blotting it out with Bailey's. Missing meals. Disputes settled with fists. Snores through the walls. About Louella dragged down the track by the hair, so to speak. The tangle of limbs in the kitchen, murmurous parties in the mess-room after lights out, a mist of dope spreading into the night air.

‘We couldn't stand it.'

But Sharon could — her eyes shone during the narration — she could stand anything, go anywhere as long as the feeling was right. But when he said he had wanted them to pack up and come and join him by about the middle of the second week, when he was depressed and homesick, she laughed disbelievingly. ‘Do you think we would have just piled into the car, dropped whatever we were doing and just come?' The thing was she loved his company, but hated being put into his myth and written off that way.

He said he couldn't understand that.

They walked around the garden. While he was away it had been scorched in a heatwave, then battered flat in freak flood rain thundering in from Alice Springs, leaving deep gouges in the track leading up to the house, drowned sheep, scoured pastures. Sharon's rescue operations had been heroic. They talked across each other, delivering bits of news, eluding the moment when both might strike on the same feeling.

‘Has anyone phoned?' he asked. ‘That guy Alastair? Harold? Bertram Junior? Anyone else?'

‘No. We saw shearers being lifted out by helicopter on the news. We wondered if one of them was you. Then you rang from Dubbo.'

‘All this rain means no work,' he said.

He pulled a bunch of creased cheques from his wallet. Bertram Junior had signed them on the benchtop at the Golden Horseshoe Motel. The money seemed like very little for the time and effort expended. He was embarrassed, humiliated, to realise that the work that had been intended, as he kept saying, to help family finances, had resulted in just one thousand one hundred dollars for an unstinting effort.

‘I'm sorry you feel bad,' said Sharon defiantly. She wasn't just someone who waited at home needing money, either. He needn't have brought back anything.

He took his garbage bags of dirty clothes and put them to soak in eucalyptus woolmix to get the smell out of
them. He scrubbed himself in a hot shower. He came out reeking of Cusson's Imperial Leather.

‘Do I smell any better?'

‘Faintly.'

They sat on the verandah drinking beer while the long, slow twilight deepened. It was an extraordinary feeling, he said, to have ordinary pleasures back again.

He put the Esky up on the verandah table, and lifted the lid. ‘Bertram Junior said this was for my missus.' Sharon gagged. It stank. It wasn't that the meat was off exactly, he said defensively. It was fatty, dusty, smoky, and only faintly green. It was fine. ‘I've cooked plenty gamier than this. If you like, I'll cook it up later and we can have it cold.'

‘It will do for the dogs.'

When it was dark Marie and Ella set a white tablecloth and lit candles. They had prepared a celebration — Turkish dips, Indian boiled eggs, flat bread and olives. They were better cooks than he was, though he spoilt the compliment by boasting he'd taught them how, by insisting they use recipe books. Irene played with the boxes of leftover shearing stores. She loved the UHT milk, warm from travelling, and his plastic bin of egglifters, beaters, and plastic bowls. Her key ring ballerina dangled from a sharpening steel. She wanted to know when he was going away again, so that he could bring back something else. ‘Bubblegum?' she pleaded.

Different corners of the house had been put to different uses since he left — homework was being done in a sort of cushion nest in a corner; the sewing machine was out, surrounded by scraps of material and tissue paper patterns; the TV and video player were in a new spot, with a scatter of crayons and drawing books. The changes were like a message:
Don't think when you go away, will you, that you are the only one who travels
. Books and papers that he had always kept in the bedroom in a squalid, unapproachable pile, were all gathered up now and put in a box that had been taken out to his workroom, where he could decide what he wanted to do with them.

There was a cautious, almost impalpable air of self-protection in the household that he had never sensed before. He felt sad to think that he had brought it on, but when he thought about what he could do to modify its meaning, he thought he could do nothing.

He walked from room to room feeling the vibrancy of colours in rugs, bedspreads and white-painted walls after the murkiness of huts. The sense of space, light and cleanliness astounded him. Hefty shapes no longer shouldered him, making demands. He fingered the pages of novels he wanted to read. The print had a raised dimension on the page, a sensuous relation to the fibres of the paper. He would have time to read if the phone didn't ring for a few days. The act of reading hit him with a rush of greedy desire. Nothing cutting across the night, no insistent pocket alarm. Just by coming back he found this part of himself again.

Exhausted, he lay down and fell asleep on the double bed. Sharon came in later and leant over him. His eyes blinked open into hers. He pushed the door shut with his heel, and his arms went around her. It was pitch dark outside. A mopoke sounded from the bush paddock. Why couldn't it always be like this? Messy emotions banished. No one issuing a challenge. A feeling of setting sail on the tide. Quiet voices, records playing, the clink of cutlery from several rooms away.

 

At dinner that night there was a great, excited story told about a snake, how Irene had been playing naked on the floor as the snake slithered past, and it had seemed like two snakes on the shinily painted boards. It had been bailed up finally in Marie's bedroom behind a stack of her clothes in the back of a cupboard. Sharon had gone driving to a neighbour's for a gun, but had come back with a different neighbour she met on the road, who used a long-handled shovel to reach the snake and delicately crush its backbone, before it was lifted outside.

Since then, Sharon kept the shovel at the back door, ready to use if necessary. She would too, although she hated the thought.

During the flood rain the family had been stranded by swollen creeks for three days and the children hadn't been able to get to school. They had a great time. Whole trees, dead calves, uprooted fenceposts had come riding past like debris in
Huckleberry Finn
, and across the causeway the water was thrown up like a huge, continuous surfing wave. He had missed all that. It had happened while he doled out meals to strangers, when lightning played below the horizon. He had always loved floods, fires, storms. Now he was pretending all over again that it wasn't some kind of conflagration happening in himself, that he wasn't finding fuel for it in the world outside his family, and as if what happened out there wouldn't have an effect on what happened here. He poured himself another glass of wine.

Around the meal table the story of where he had been acquired polish, becoming the quest of a boy remembering he was a man, who fell in with a bunch of rough characters, the good, the bad, and the lost, the dreaming and the practical, and set off on the road with them, camping by the wayside, living a smoky life under low, galvanised iron roofing, setting off again one day, and reaching a glittering highway motel, where he was abruptly forced to leave their company, hoping to find them again when he could, and rejoin their story, following it through to an unpredictable end.

‘Is this
true?
' said Irene, looking at her sisters for confirmation. The nightly bedtime stories they read her had this lilt.

He told them more about the trials of Louella, her rebellion, her exile, and her poolside reappearance; he described Christian T, who when he left Leopardwood Downs held a resentment against him, believing he had stolen his radio batteries, believing that all cooks were thieving bastards, and this Aussie one a special prick — so he had stolen three of his Coopers from the freezer just to show him. He told them about Davo and Barb, his first shed friends, who would always be his friends, he felt, and were sure to appear at the farm with their caravan one
day, because that was the kind of friends they were. Practically family.

‘Well,
we
don't know them,' said Marie.

He spoke about the sudden invasion of bodies at lunchtime in the hot, silent kitchen, the coughs and groans at night, the nightmare yells through the plywood walls of the huts, and the stars at night, how he had slept under them, and the landscapes that had returned him to childhood recollections.

He talked about Bertram Junior. The game-playing that kept his interests up. The effervescence, the stubborn charisma: his refusal to smile unless he really, badly needed something from someone, or else when he forgot his responsibilities totally, and lifted into a state of pure joy, when he seemed to float clear of the ground, hiccupping with giggles.

He told how when he was cooking he had remembered, for the first time in years, that he had owned a fox terrier pup as a boy. The dog called Dirty who had died of tick paralysis, and his mother had comforted him with words that created an image of shattered calm. Spilt milk. Tears. Stiffened back leg, where the vet had shaved the hairs off to reveal where the tick had gone in, creating a neat clean hole. How he had never been as close to a dog since — but how when he thought back over the shed he had cooked at he wished he'd had one with him.

‘What sort of dog?' Ella traced fingers on the linen tablecloth in the flickering candlelight.

Sharon smiled. ‘I can't see you with a dog.'

‘Well, I had one once. So that proves something. I dunno — a terrier? You know, a rat catcher, Jack Russell. That's the sort of dog I mean. I could feed it on scraps and I wouldn't have buckets overflowing all the time.'

‘It would get too fat,' said Ella.

‘I'd take it on walks. Train it to put its front paws on the open window while I drove along. It would bite anyone who touched my Coopers. It'd sleep on the back of the truck with me.'

Sharon and his daughters loved dogs. They loved dog stories, dog antics, dogs with strangled barks, moon-mad howls, and craven whimpers; they loved wrestling with dogs on grass, playing dog-to-dog with them, shampooing them, dressing them in dolls' bonnets, shawls, tea-towels, anything — taking photos of dogs smoking pipes, sitting dogs on their knees in posed groups. They loved dog baskets and dog runs, dog oddities and irregularities — it was all the same to them. Dog stories ran back in family history. Dachshunds being squeezed like bagpipes; kelpies balancing on motorbikes; dog after dog being killed by tiger snakes here on the farm. Snakebitten dogs were buried in graves marked by granite rocks. ‘They died before you were born,' Irene was told. But it had happened more recently, too. It was practically an annual event. Irene would start noticing it now, and remembering. It would mark the dimension of time for her, shadowing her birthdays, and she would know down a long tunnel of possibility, the fact of death. There would be no use crying over spilt milk.

Look. There were the current dogs now, Minnie and Kate, the whippet and the German coulie staring in at the meal table with raised jawlines from the bricked verandah outside. Kate was the best sheepdog Sharon had ever had. Sharon took her to Goulburn where she ran across the backs of sheep in the packed saleyards, winning admiration from men who otherwise wouldn't budge on the concept of a woman farming.