Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (9 page)

Crofts took a deep breath. ‘I can't wait to have that swim,' he said, striving to sound at ease, and he moved off.

‘You've got no taste, Robert,' Gil remarked cheerfully, unaware of any awkwardness between them, and privately decided that Crofts must have a bit of a problem in that direction. He winked at Alistair. ‘Don't they let you think about it in pommy-land?'

They continued on in silence for a while, with Janet Rankin's distant figure a reminder of the tension that had developed between them. After a few minutes, when Crofts had still not contributed to the banter, when it seemed he might continue in silence for the rest of the walk to the swimming hole, Gil said drily, ‘I hope your aim with that thing's better than your imagination, Robert.' He spat to one side of the track, as if he suspected he still might not get a response from the stockman.

‘Well he shot Julia instead of her foal,' Alistair reminded him quickly, eager to make the most of the opportunity to undermine Crofts and ingratiate himself with his uncle at the same time.

‘We know all about that,' Gil responded shortly—it was not his intention to embarrass Crofts, or to cause a permanent rift between them. His desire was rather to establish a solid friendship between himself and the stockman. And it was this desire, together with his natural generosity, that prompted him now to move up alongside the stockman and put his arm round his shoulders. ‘The best shots miss sometimes, don't they mate?' he said, shaking Crofts affectionately and grinning at him. Then on a sudden impulse he pulled Crofts up and held him by the shoulders for a moment. ‘I bet you I can stay under the longest!' he challenged, and with that he gave the stockman a shove that almost sent him sprawling, and sprinted on ahead, whooping and yelling and waving his rifle. As he got closer to Janet she broke into a run and made straight for the creek.

Alistair was left standing with Crofts. He cast a nervous glance at the stockman, as if he thought it might be dangerous to be left by himself with him. Then, clutching his bag of bullets close to his chest, he took off, stumbling and ducking between the thorn bushes.

Suddenly alone in the bush, Crofts stood still and watched Alistair running away. Then the stockman gave in to a strange impulse: he slipped the rifle from his shoulder, drew back the bolt and opened the breach partway. He gazed absently at it for a long time, as if transfixed by the hollowness of the oiled mechanism, by the slim cradle beneath his thumb, and by the beauty of its precision. Then he pulled the bolt to its full extent and the first bullet in the spring-loaded clip jumped into place with a satisfying click. He closed the bolt on it, driving the bullet into the chamber and cocking the mechanism in the one movement. He took his time, as if each deliberate movement had its own significance for him and were not simply a step in the completion of another action—he might have been practising a systematic series of exercises. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, shrugged and settled the butt comfortably into the hollow between his shoulder muscle and his chest, resting his cheek there as he looked along the sights. He followed the khaki-clad figure of the running boy, who was only just visible through the bare thorn bushes. Darting along close to the ground, he was like a flightless bird abandoned by its swifter companions, hopelessly attempting to take off into the black branches.

The end of the rifle-barrel tracked slowly back and forth. Crofts was intent on centring the foresight on the diminishing target. He was holding his breath and his lungs were becoming tight, so that it was increasingly difficult for him to remain steady.

Unconsciously he increased the pressure of his finger on the trigger.

The explosion threw him back and the rough bark of a tree grazed his shoulder. Fear swept through him and he cried out involuntarily.

The stockman stood still as the roar of the shot raced away through the bush around him, startling drowsing cockatoos high in the branches of the river gums. The rifle hung by his side and his heart was pumping so hard he could scarcely breathe, as he stared at the point where he had last seen the running boy in his sights. Beneath his fear, as if it were a strong memory suddenly awakened, the stockman was aware of an exultation sweeping through him with the rush of his blood. It was an emotion he had never suspected in himself and one he would have found difficult to explain to others.

He ran forward, smashing the prickly bushes as he searched the ground ahead of him, gripped by dread at what he might see. He reached the bank of the creek and stopped. Alistair's tracks where he had run down the broken bank were clearly impressed into the silt. Relief spread through the stockman and he retreated several metres into the bush off to one side of the track, and squatted there out of sight in the broken shade of a splintered beefwood tree. He shuffled himself close in against its base until the ridged bark dug painfully into the muscles of his back and the dry particles of the crushed grasses rose and tickled his nostrils.

He wanted to laugh and yell with relief, and jump up and down and wave his arms around like a madman; but he sat perfectly still, leaning hard against the steady resistance of the old tree. If he had killed Alistair he knew there would have been an inexplicable satisfaction in it. But now a quiver of pleasure was running through him, so intense that it cooled the surface of his skin, prickling the hairs on his arms and raising a pattern of tiny goosebumps. Now that he was safe he did not attempt to suppress his unexpected enjoyment. Gazing out at the scrub from the privacy of his concealment, Crofts saw again the running figure in his sights and heard the explosive shock, as if the event had taken place over a long period of time instead of in less than a second. He pressed harder against the tree and shivered as another chilling contraction passed through him—the impulse of the gunshot was going down through his chest and into his bowels, penetrating to the tips of his toes and making them tingle.

As the stockman squatted in the shade against the dark base of the beefwood, so still he would have been invisible to anyone passing, an afternoon cicada chorus began to scream suddenly, without warning, as if triggered by some mysterious alarm. The tide of noise rose and swept the hot and silent bush with oscillating waves of shrill intensity, passing back and forth and rising in layers upon itself until the sound reverberated inside the stockman's skull. The invisible insects flooded the enthralled afternoon.

A few minutes later the cicadas ceased their signalling as abruptly as they had begun it. In the deep shadows of the beefwood the stockman shifted his weight. Fragments of high-spirited shouts and laughter began to reach him from the direction of the creek. He rose slowly to his feet and moved back in the direction of the cattle track. There was a look of unhappy resignation on his face as he made his way towards the swimming party, and just before going down the creek bank he glanced back once over his shoulder at the dry level country spread out behind him. A trace of intense emotion resonated within him, but it was rapidly being overlaid by anxieties about the fight tomorrow evening—there was a dumb regret in him that he had not, after all, found a way to avoid that. His anger quickly accumulated against this barrier to his happiness—at this moment Robert Crofts hated the Rankins with all his heart.

•

Gil Sturgiss and the stockman were diving and wrestling together in the sunlit water of Toby's Hole. They looked startlingly different from how they had at lunch; there was something disturbing about them now, a mixture of the comic and the sinister. They had both had their hair cropped into spiky crew cuts in readiness for the fights—it was what Janet had been laughing at when she had passed them earlier on the track. It made them look almost like brothers, or initiates of a mysterious organisation. They looked gaunt and hollow-eyed, their cheekbones and jaws more angular and prominent than before; without the dark frame of soft hair there was no distraction from the shape of the bones. And the bone structure looked even more pronounced where the tanned skin of their faces met the glazed whiteness of the freshly exposed areas. It was this unnatural shining pallor in the bronzing air of summer that gave them their slightly sinister aspect.

An edge of seriousness—something more than a testing of limits and a cautious sounding of the other's strength—had crept into their play-wrestling in the water. In Crofts' case there was a carry-over of his earlier unease, which was being exacerbated now by the intrusive way Gil Sturgiss was driving him at an obstacle all the time—as if sparring was the only way he could conceive of them encountering each other. Gil was responding to Crofts' growing irritation and their aggression was barely in check as they struggled to dump each other under the water—Gil's longer legs also gave him a natural advantage which increased as they manoeuvred off the shelving sand into deeper water.

Ida and Ward Rankin were observing all this from the tranquillity of the shade; they were reclining with reading matter and drinks high under the bank where the camp had been established for the afternoon.

Ida Rankin put aside the magazine she had been half-reading and got up. She walked down across the wide strip of sand and dived into the water a few metres downstream from her brother and the stockman. Ward Rankin did not get up, but he did raise himself a little on his elbows.

•

The crew cuts had been Gil's idea. He had had one the previous year for the fight and had proposed to Crofts numerous justifications for the style when fighting. The stockman had submitted. He was convinced anyway of the inevitably miserable outcome of the fight, so privately he dreamt of the future, of a time when all this would be over and things would have settled back into a comfortable state for him. For the moment he tried optimistically to view the disjointedness of this Christmas as a temporary condition.

The whole family had trooped down the back steps to witness the big event—Ida Rankin had even remembered the camera and dashed back for it at the last minute. Gil had taken his turn first. Stripped to the waist and seated astride the iron block of the anvil—‘christening', as they had said, the stockman's new shelter at the shoeing area—Gil had joked and laughed while Ward Rankin clipped his hair almost to the scalp. Alistair and Janet had watched the proceedings with delight from their perches on the cross-poles; although the boy had experienced a shiver of apprehension that Gil might insist on including him in the business.

A year ago Alistair Rankin would have felt securely shielded by his mother from such a possibility and would have been able to enjoy this spectacle without reserve. Today he was less certain of receiving her protection; he sensed that he could no longer leap carelessly into situations such as this without risking himself a little. He was nursing a suspicion—which he was not prepared to put to the test now—that his mother might simply look on despite his protests, and leave him to his own devices in the face of Gil's strangely dangerous enthusiasms.

Something had changed between them. He did not understand what it was, but he knew he could no longer make a confident appeal for her protection in all possible circumstances, whether he had justice on his side or not. Her attention was directed elsewhere. This worried him deeply. He had made several significant adjustments in his behaviour for her sake during the last twelve months, but they had gone unnoticed by her. Somewhere along the way the rules had changed. Her loyalty to him had become conditional and he could not work out what the new conditions were. He had begun just lately to consider the possibility that it might require a major misdeed from him to shock the system back on course. It was an unpleasant possibility and the responsibility of it sat heavily with him now as he watched his mother happily engrossed in taking snapshots. Her attention, he noticed, did not stray to him from time to time for his approval as it once used to; she no longer automatically sought to include him in her pleasures. Not so long ago there had been between them a covenant of love so secure that it had excluded the rest of the world . . . So he had sat hunched forward on the pale cross-pole next to his sister, his elbows on his knees, his fists jammed up under his eyes, and he had observed the scene before him.

‘Make sure we get a couple of good before-and-afters,' Gil had shouted. It had been
his
show. Things like this never happened when Gil was not around; others might have ideas, but they never made them happen.

Alistair had noticed that his own inclusion in his mother's snapshots was incidental; she had not made sure of getting him in. Her real interest, it had suddenly become clear to him, was Robert Crofts. What had been hitherto a loathsome suspicion was now for him a cold, aching certainty.

Gil had kept trying to grab the camera from his sister, and then he would crouch in odd positions to demonstrate angles she shouldn't miss; he had been lost with her in their antics, oblivious to everything else except their own bright pleasure. ‘We want a good record of that beautiful straight nose, Sis, while we've got the chance. She could be looking a bit squash-erood by tomorrow night!' Gil had loved it. The Sturgiss spirit had been in control and in full flight on the Rankin place. And the camera had clicked again—Crofts with his head bent stiffly forward, his legs spread squarely across the iron body of the anvil, his arms folded over his chest, and his back bent as he gazed steadily down at the spike. Ward Rankin was leaning over him, his left hand gripping the stockman's head while he worked the clippers with his right. Sweat had stuck his white shirt to his spine and the thin knobbly line of the vertebrae was sharply outlined, in contrast to the sinuous dorsal cleft along Crofts' deeply muscled back.

Alistair could not remember how long it had lasted—it might have been for longer than a year—that he had once imagined his parents were trying to poison him. He had lived in a state of nervous tension during that period, with both the ever-present dread that some sign would confirm his horrible suspicion, and with the equally strained hope that a counter-sign would prove it to be unfounded. Neither sign had ever appeared to him and the suspicion had gradually abated, until it was no more than a vague uncertainty that he felt most of the time. What had remained with him in particular from this experience, was a habit of watchfulness.