Siddon Rock (13 page)

Marjorie was startled, surprised that he could even think she'd want to leave London and the jazz.
Whatever for?
she said.
This is my life here.

But over the next month the seed took root, watered by the barman's daily question:
Sure ya don't want to come home?
The night he cleaned down the bar for the last time and walked out of the club into a smoggy and icy London early morning, Marjorie felt the call of the Australian sun, and walked out with him.

On the long, slow voyage across the English Channel, through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal and down into the Indian Ocean, Marjorie and the barman watched the oceans change from cold grey through all shades of blue and green. As they saw the low, flat coastline of home he said,
You know I've gotta take over the family pub. D'ya want to come too?

This time there was no hesitation for Marjorie, no
But what about my music?
No
What am I going to?
In fact, not a second passed before she answered.

Why not?
Marjorie replied, and her blue notes settled on her shoulders with barely a sigh.

On the train, as it rocked its way across flat, pale-soiled land towards Bluey's home town, Bluey put his arm around her.
Ya going to miss all that?
he said. And Marge took it to mean,
Are you going to be happy staying here at the edge of the outback, or are you going to want to go back to Europe and the music?

Nah
, she said.
This'll be just fine. There's music everywhere.

Bluey stood firmly on the floor of the swaying train.
Can you hear it here, Margie?
Marge nodded, feeling through the soles of her feet a sound deeper than the rhythm of the train, a sombre, more insistent note.

Marge soon found the rhythms of Siddon Rock were quieter and rougher than any she had experienced, more apparently singular, but with a supportive, interwoven
complexity. It took only a short time for her to settle into the routine.

Sometimes when the telephone rang and Marge picked up the receiver there was a sea-like silence broken by a single note that blew a dark hole in her day. Most times it was a flattened fifth note, but now and then a bent third emerged. At these times Marge took herself to the top of Siddon Rock itself, until the blues she found in a basement in Soho retreated to the edge of her vision. Then she would go back to Bluey Redall and his pub.

 

LIFE AT THE TWO MILE
resumed a daily rhythm different from before Macha went to war; different, too, from those established while she was away. The silence she had left behind had been strange for Brigid and Granna, used as they were to the cheerful, noisy efficiency of Macha around the farm, but over time they had become accustomed to it. Now she was home, the silence grew deeper and darker, asking something of the two women, but even Granna could not know what this was.

Brigid would sit next to Macha as she stared from the verandah towards the salt lake with her rifle at her side. She would touch her arm and tell her the stories she had told her when she was a child, willing her words to break through the silence. Granna could see the heart-pain in Brigid, and could offer nothing to ease it.

Macha pulled her bed onto the north verandah but she did not sleep. She could not sleep. If Brigid or Granna had asked,
Why can't you sleep, Macha Machushla?
, Macha, had she replied, would have said,
Sleep is dangerous.

When Macha was not on the verandah she was walking the paddocks or was far out on the plains. Farmers and townspeople alike quickly became used to seeing Macha around the district, clad in only army boots and hat and carrying the rifle.
If that's what she wants, that's what she can do,
Young George said, the first time he saw his niece walking across his paddocks.
I reckon that whatever she's been through's given her the right to do what she likes.
And no-one argued with him, not even once.

Will she be safe?
Brigid asked Granna, who seemed not to hear the question. Brigid imagined Macha's Irish-fair skin burning in the fierce inland heat or being penetrated by poisonous wild things that lived in the bush. But the sun did not affect Macha, nor did the bitter chill of an inland winter night. And the bush to her was a place of safety.

The arrival of her kit, three weeks after she had walked into town, made Macha go to that piece of bush known as the Yackoo for the first time since she came home. There she was, gazing out to the salt lake when the station-master, Kenneth Placer, phoned Brigid Connor to tell her that a kit belonging to Corporal M. Connor had been at the station for days, and please to pick it up.

Goin' in to pick up your kit
, Brigid said to Macha, and when she looked up Macha was gone, heading across the paddocks towards the Yackoo.

All her life Macha had gone into the Yackoo, not realising that it was an impenetrable place until Fatman Aberline told her.
How d'ya get through that mallee?
he asked.
Dad said it's like a brick wall.

Macha was amazed.
I just walk in
, she said.
It's easy. Just walk in
, and she took Fatman in with her at times, until he was thirteen. Then the bush seemed to get thicker and more resistant to him. He found it too difficult to slide his new large body through the spaces between the trees, and so he stopped going.

Now, Macha still found it easy to
just walk in
. Beyond the external rim of thick scrub the interior of the Yackoo was park-like. The high, loose leaf canopy of white-trunked eucalypts was tipped with bronze new growth that fractured sunlight as it slanted down, as clear and clean as the sound of a bell.

Macha walked quietly, stealthily, through the trees, avoiding dry twigs as if she might surprise someone at rest in the park. The rifle seemed somehow unbefitting to this place.

At the centre was a lean-to made from long branches propped against a tree, their ends anchored firmly in the ground. These had cross-struts tied with wire – small beams to hold the structure firm. Part of the frame was packed with grass to give solid walls and form a partially enclosed shelter. A fragile-looking thing, this, but it had stood there since the day the twelve-year-old Macha had built it to show Fatman Aberline how it was done.

Macha leaned the rifle on the tree and took off the hat. She stretched up towards the leaf canopy of the trees,
and in the dappling play of sun and shadow on her white body and pale red hair, she could have been a young tree growing towards the light. She inspected the lean-to, then settled herself in its shelter with her back against the tree. There she stayed until dusk, when she returned to the Two Mile.

The farmers whose land abutted the Yackoo's extensive edges often looked longingly at the large, almost circular area of thick mallee scrub. They could see it disappear, replaced by paddocks of wheat or sown pasture feeding stolid sheep. But their visions always came to nothing as they suddenly realised the impracticality of clearing such a dense and inhospitable place. All, that is, except Macha's uncle Young George Aberline.

Just before the war Young George tried to clear the Yackoo, as had his father Thomas before him. The town had watched with interest as he scorned the old and weak equipment of the Mulligan brothers and brought in Berthold's Bush Bashers, a contracting company that specialised in broad-acre clearing.

The noise started when the Bashers' equipment trundled through town: bulldozers the size of mountains; tractors that snorted and roared like the bunyip in stories told to fractious kids; chains as thick and solid as Fatman Aberline's thigh. Children – who, like animals, know of the unusual before it happens – heard the cavalcade well before it reached the town and rushed from the classroom. They
hung on the school fence, overawed by the bright orange monsters unlike anything they'd ever seen.

That night in the pub the Bashers team talked figures, numbers, statistics. They told the locals just how good these machines were:
Nothing like 'em anywhere in Australia
, they said.
Boss had them specially imported from America. They do things big over there, ya know.

The young blokes were excited, saying things like,
It's about bloody time someone used that land. Bloody waste otherwise, that's what it is.
The old-timers held their tongues, knowing what they knew. They stayed silent when the largest bulldozer blew its engine as it pushed towards the first line of bush. The explosion ripped apart the somnolent morning as a great ball of fire billowed against the calm blue of the sky. The flames lit the town with a garish yellow light and the outline of the Yackoo shimmered like a mirage through the burning fumes.

Not a word was said as the thick chains broke against small trees or were flung into the air by the whippy trunks of mallee. They snapped back hungrily towards the Bashers crew and thumped to earth, raising a cloud of dust that coated everything in the town with a layer of pale grit.

They held their counsel when tractor tyres blew out, penetrated by sharp branches hidden under the surface of the ground, creating the need for running repairs on site. Herbie Hinks, who owned the one small garage in town, pulled his son from school and set him to running the petrol pump for the townspeople, leaving Herbie free to
look after the Bashers' tyres and repairs.
Making a mint
, he said.
Don't matter if he misses a couple of readin' lessons.

In the pub after another frustrating day, the contractors muttered things like:
Never seen such a bloody impossible piece of land
and
This bush is fuckin' up everything that goes near it.
Young George insisted they keep trying. He had inherited the firm will – some would say stubbornness – of his grandmother, Eliza May Winton, and didn't like to be beaten.
Payin' ya good money to do this
, he said.
Ya gotta give it a decent go.

One morning, after a particularly bad day that had seen all the Bashers' bulldozers stopped by one thing or another, there was no roar of engines to wake the town at daybreak. Herbie Hinks drove out to see what was going on, and came back amazed.
Not a bloody soul in sight
, he said.
All that machinery's just sitting there in Young George's paddock, and there's no-one around.

And no-one from Berthold's Bush Bashers was ever there again. They left the monolithic pieces of machinery standing in a row facing the Yackoo, looking for all the world like huge creatures waiting for a chance to enter. There they stayed, a memorial to the battle between man and the bush. Over the years, salt blown from the lake rusted them to surreal shapes that seemed to have always been a part of the landscape.

Sue us if you want
, the manager of Berthold's Bush Bashers said to Young George when he telephoned him to see what was happening.
Won't do you no good. After this we're broke anyways.

That night Young George stayed at the bar until his son David and Fatman Aberline tied him onto the back of his truck and drove him home.
Should a body meet a body
, Young George sang through the shake and rattle as the truck bounced down the track to his farm,
comin' thru the rye / Should a body mow a body / need a body cry?

Fatman Aberline was riding his motorbike slowly alongside the truck and talking through the window to his cousin. He laughed when he heard Young George's song.
Y'know what our grandad Tom said, after he tried to clear the Yackoo? ‘That bloody piece of bush is harder to mow than a bloody woman, not letting you in when ya want to.' But silly bugger, Young George. You'd reckon he'd have learnt that the Yackoo is bad luck.

But
bad luck
was not how the old-timers saw it. To Young George they said,
Well, you know the Yackoo
,
it always had a mind of its own.
But
bloody stupid
was the general opinion or
jinxed
. And old stories circulated: about how blokes would try to walk through the Yackoo and not come back; or, if they made it, how they'd be delirious for days and not recall what happened.
Remember that young fella from the goldfields?
Bluey Redall said.
I was just a kid. He went there to camp – said he wanted some trees after all the bloody sand he'd seen. Well no-one saw him again, did they!

Then Bert Truro, who was not prone to smiling, said,
Old Nell goes there all the time. Bloody black gin practically lives there, when she's not in the creek-bed.
He blew the froth off his beer and took a long swill.
I reckon she's cursed it, so's no-one else can go there.

Kelpie Crush, who usually contributed nothing to bar gossip, said sharply,
Curses aren't so easily laid, old man. They usually take generations to work.
But a mutter rumbled through the few men left at the bar at this late hour.
Yeah
, someone said, and the voice could have belonged to any one of them,
maybe we should just ask her about it all.
And a small group of men found themselves standing outside Nell's hut in the ancient creek-bed shouting for her to come out, although she was obviously not there.
Prob'ly in the Yackoo
, someone muttered.
I aren't goin' there.