Siddon Rock (9 page)

This night – the night Macha Connor came home – Kelpie Crush unlocked the Strangers' Room. In the light from the single hanging bulb he picked up several photographs and anchored them with drawing-pins to the wooden table. He shook the contents of an envelope marked MOTHS onto a sheet of white paper. Working quickly and flicking away body parts that fell off, he placed insects on the photographs, then, when he was satisfied with the effect, pinned them to the back of the door, in a pattern with others there.

Kelpie stood looking at the display on the door for a moment. He moved a photo or two, straightening them almost tenderly where they had skewed. Then he chose a recipe book from the pile on the table and leafed through it. He took the book and left the Strangers' Room, locking the door behind him.

In the bar, Kelpie saw a strange, throbbing light playing across the frosted windows, filling the room with
shifting shadows that made it seem larger. At the window a woman was peering in, holding her hands at the side of her face, trying to see through the writing on the pane. He smiled to himself and walked to the door, but by the time he had unlocked it the woman was well down the street, passing the Farmers' Co-op.

Kelpie waited a moment before he started to follow her, alert to her every move and keeping close to shop windows, stopping now and then in case she turned around. He thought the woman was a stranger to the town and this intrigued him, as did the rhythmic waves of light and shadow that filled the street. He found himself walking faster to reach their source, which appeared to be about halfway along Wickton Street. The woman stopped in front of Meakins' Haberdashery and Ladies & Men's Apparel, and Kelpie also stopped, turning to look in the window of the Farmers' Co-op. There, instead of the usual piles of farm implements, sheep dip and drenches, worming tablets and chemicals, was the stuff of his desire.

It is to be noted that Kelpie Crush slept little, and many things occupied him during the night. In the darkest hours he would think about the boy scouts cub pack and the collection in the Strangers' Room, but it was French cuisine – or, to be more precise, reproducing French recipes as closely as possible to the original, considering the general lack of ingredients available – that kept him in the kitchen of the hotel often until daybreak. Now, here in the window of the Farmers' Co-op of Siddon Rock, here was the real
thing, the ridgy-didge, the real McCoy: an authentic French market stacked to the ceiling with all that was needed to produce the
vol au vents
and
terrines
,
crêpes
and
galettes
,
quiches
,
cassoulets
and
tartes
of the recipe book he still held in his hand. And there, right at the front, was a large
casserole
of Kelpie's favourite –
blanquette de veau
. This looked quite unlike the
blanquette
he made for himself, but he could tell what it was because of the ingredients arranged around the pot. On one side of the
casserole
were stacks of the raw produce that went into its making – tiny white mushrooms, pearly baby onions, carrots and leeks tied together in graceful bunches, and, of course, perfectly trimmed and equally sized pieces of tender pink veal. On the opposite side were a jug of cream and pats of butter; a bottle of wine leaned on its side against the
casserole
, with a shining yellow lemon, surrounded by posies of herbs, at its base.

Kelpie excitedly leafed through the recipe book that he still held, quickly comparing listed ingredients with those on display. He tried to open the door of the Co-op but it was locked tight and barred. He shook the door in frustration, the light flashed and twirled around him, reflected in a row of upended saucepans that lined the front of the scene in the window. A young boy entered and began taking things from the display.
No
, Kelpie shouted, banging the recipe book on the glass.
No. Wait for me.

The young boy seemed not to hear for a moment, then he looked up and a smile – was it of recognition? – crinkled his face.

As the light slowed to a lazy undulation Kelpie Crush watched the boy take the objects of his desires away, until all that was left in the window was the row of saucepans. Kelpie waited for the boy to come back, but he did not appear. Kelpie knelt on the pavement to look at the pans, and there was no reflection of him in the mirror-like steel that made their sides, and then they too disappeared.

Kelpie, with no thought to the woman he had been following, turned away from the window and went back to the pub. There he locked himself in the Strangers' Room, not emerging until Bluey Redall called him the next morning, wanting the keys to the bar so he could open for business.

The dust that inundated the town later that same night did not start in the usual way by appearing at the edge of the horizon as a reddish-grey smudge rushing on the town to take it in the white heat of desire. This was not a storm that lifted the earth and filled the landscape with a dull roaring and the houses with the topsoil from the paddocks. Nor was it one that began in small gasps which blew the stack of newsprint at the back door of Sinclair Johnson's printery, lifting one or two pages slightly then letting them fall, and with the next breath rattling the weathercock on the top of the Railway and Traveller's Hotel making it oscillate wildly with no true direction. No, it was not like that.

This is how it happened.

By midnight the power from the storage batteries had been drained, leaving the white light of a waning
moon hanging low in the western sky as the only light in the town. One o'clock on the night Macha Connor came home was crystal-clear with a chilly wind from the south. There began, around about that time, a subtle rustling and shuffling as bush creatures became restless and, responding to a strangeness in the air, moved away from the town borders. Cockatoos and parrots with their daytime eyes flew awkwardly. Domestic pets joined them, and Maureen Mather stirred in uneasy sleep when the budgerigar flew uselessly against the bars of its cage, wanting to join the flight.

From their safe distance the animals watched when, at two o'clock, the wind stopped and the first dust rose gently from the gravelled station-yard and hovered two or three inches above the ground. At the same time, behind the Town Hall and Shire Offices, a puff or two lifted from the treeless yard.

Three minutes to three saw Young George Aberline's paddock, the one that bordered the edge of the town, begin to lift: dust wafted upwards as if from a lightly shaken blanket, rising and settling again, each time gaining more volume.

At the window of the Methodist manse, the Reverend Siegfried Butow watched the dust billow and settle.
This country
, he thought.
This appalling place.

Siggy Butow, in a burst of existential despair at the drabness of life in war-torn England, had left the hills and dales of
Yorkshire for the new horizons of Australia. Of the dioceses that were available when he enquired, he chose this one of Siddon Rock because he felt most at home in the country: an open-air environment where he could continue his life of preaching and walking the countryside. He packed three favourite walking sticks, sturdy crooks carved from oak that he expected to help him over the hills of his new landscape.

Not for a second did he think, as he climbed the rock that first time, that he would look out to infinity and experience a gut-churning nausea that would return to him whenever he thought of that moment. Nothing in his confined experience had given him the imagination to picture the endlessness of the plains that were green for only a moment each year, nor the overwhelming vastness of the sky that held down the earth in an immense blue dome. This was not at all like his home in Yorkshire where he had written sermons in his head as he roamed green hills. This terrain was engulfing, all-encompassing, life-taking. It had no reason to be kind.

So Siggy Butow stayed within the safety of the manse next to the Methodist church. He ordered supplies by telephone for delivery from the Farmers' Co-op. Only occasionally did he venture as far as the tiny library at the Council Offices, and not at all to small settlements at the outer edges of the diocese, although he was expected to service these with the word of God. And so the nausea was joined by guilt, which resulted in insomnia.

This night Siggy was reading one of the many books he received by mail order from a large bookshop in the capital. He had become interested in archaeology and natural history since arriving in Siddon Rock, spurred by the arcane countryside that confined him to the inner streets of the town.

Now Siggy was not, nor ever had been, an advocate of Darwinism. He well understood what happened when the biblical teachings were departed from: the confusions of soul and questioning of scripture. This he would never do. Siggy understood the Bible as absolute truth organised into easy-to-understand parables for the less educated. However, tonight, when the rest of the town was well asleep and Siggy's own vital energy low, somehow an essay on the life and times of the dinosaurs had crept into his reading and seductively lured him into its text.
Just think
, he read,
how nothing ever disappears completely. While the bones of the dinosaurs became embedded in the earth, and a few of these have been recovered to tell us about them – their size and shape, and by the teeth what they ate – what about the rest? These bones presumably lay on top of the ground, in areas that were relatively stable and not subjected to the upheavals of mountains being made and seas moving together to form the large oceans. Over time the enormous heat and winds dried them to dust, and they became as one with the earth– dust to dust. Realise, too, that dust never disappears; it is with us always. So all the generations of humankind to this day have breathed in minute fragments of the dinosaur; and as an aside to this, also of the stardust thrown into earth's
atmosphere by the burning-up of meteors. One could say that through our very breath we are connected with infinity.