The Following (15 page)

Glenn Pritchett, the orchardist; Roland Mainwaring, the council grader driver; Mrs Frances Hoad, the schoolteacher; Jim Pickering, the poultry farmer; Sven Petersen, the publican; and Connie Petros, from the Three Roses Café, made up almost the sum total, along with Ross Devlin, of local branch members. Sven was away and Max was up from Sydney helping out, dispensing largesse. He was in his mid-twenties and finishing at university while doing something youthful at Trades Hall. He wore a rainbow-coloured headband and white, flared trousers. His brothers – to be accurate, his stepbrothers – ran other pubs. They were beefy blokes, unlike Max with his slight build and handsome, guitar-strummer’s looks.

Max was adopted. His natural mother had died in childbirth the year of Max’s birth, 1952. His adoptive mother was Jessie Petersen. She loved Max with an anguished longing. Max loved her in return with the arc of love’s incompletion.

Jessie came into the bar carrying plates of pies and dishes of Irish stew, and after she put them down she gave Max a peck on the cheek, ruffled his hair and beamed at him.

‘Everything all right, darling?’

‘Humming,’ said Max.

Jessie turned to Ross Devlin. ‘He’s looking after you, dear?’

‘None better,’ said Ross.

‘It’s on the h-house,’ said Max, putting a schooner in front of Ross. ‘Look. Look out the window, mate,’ he said, looping an arm around Ross’s shoulder and steering him aside.

Ross cupped his hands to the window at the end of the bar. A young man with curly hair down to his shoulders, wearing an army disposals jacket, was hosing dust from a car under the bare globe of an outside light, a low-slung, dark-green Jaguar sedan.

‘There’s the future of the party,’ said Max. ‘A self-interested partnership.’

‘Whose bus is that?’ said Ross.

‘It’s mine,’ said Max.

‘You’re joking.’

‘No bull.’

It beat Ross how Max did it. He was the new generation. Last year it was an Indian Chief motorbike. Now a Jag. Max was half a generation younger than Ross, a part-time union organiser and already driving a luxury car, the best of British make, while Ross scrimped and saved and drove a battered ute. Sven Petersen would buy a pub for his sons if they’d work it, never a car, not even a pushbike. Max’s generation declared their principles, fought for them if need be down to the level of brawls in the street, and then lined up at the trough of material gain without blushing.

Max introduced Tiger Yeomans, and he was a talker: ‘I’ve heard all about you, Ross Devlin, Max says you’re the tops. What keeps you going, do you get depressed, nobody turning up like this, when you don’t have a quorum? I’ve heard you’re a stayer – you’d have to be. They say the party got the crappiest vote here of anywhere.’

Ross said, ‘You want your ears boxed.’

‘It’s not your fault!’

‘Tiger goes on a bit,’ said Max. ‘We’ve joined a small concern. Analysis and agitprop.’

‘PR,’ said Tiger. ‘How do you like the staff car?’

‘What sort of a name is Tiger?’ said Ross.

‘Grrr, comrade,’ said Tiger Yeomans with a boyish grin.

Ross remembered the name then. ‘Yeomans, the Admiral?’ he said.

‘He’s my old man,’ said Tiger.

It explained the accent, the overdone banter and party enthusiasm in the absence of authentic roots.

Godfrey Yeomans was a naval officer, an Admiral of the fleet who was all over the news, for a while, just before the party got in (and was pushed out), a decorated serviceman with a celebrated grouch against the other lot.

‘Can he be trusted?’ said Ross.

‘Loyal, that’s our Tiges,’ said Max.

‘I feel like, now I’ve shaken your hand,’ said Tiger, ‘that I’ve touched something going a long way back. The great tradition going back – back to the nineties – to Marcus Friendly and the Big Strike, to the war, to the post-war years, to the night Pig Iron Bob took it from him – how do you feel about him, the bloke? What was he like, Marcus Friendly? What was it like the night he – the night he – the night he –’

‘Died?’ said Ross.

Max went along wiping the bar with a wet rag.

Tiger lowered his voice: ‘You were there. Max never shuts up about it. You were just a kid.’

Max called for last orders. ‘One for the road?’

‘Trades Hall have their eye on Max,’ said Tiger. ‘He’s the coming man. They’re sending him to China, Cuba, Vietnam – on a youth league round the world junket, all expenses paid.’

Max pulled down the shutters, ushered out the last drunks. He wanted Tiger to taste Ross’s hooch. They went to their cars. Tiger backed the Jag out with a throaty rumble of exhaust.

‘Follow me,’ said Ross. He drove with the windows down, enjoying the night air, clearing his head after the fug of the bar. It was a long drive across a bare, moonlit plain, avoiding kangaroos and ditches at the side of the road. The other pair of headlights followed at a distance.

Close to midnight the three arrived at Inverarity Station and stumbled into the overseer’s quarters. Ross pulled out the square bottle and banged it on the kitchen table with three glass tumblers.

It was the same routine whenever Max came out from town on a late-night spin, the glasses filled, the glasses raised, the glasses clinked, and Max and Ross meeting each other’s eye across the trembling brim.

‘G’luck.’

‘Chugalug.’

‘Wonder of wonders,’ said Tiger.

A ribbon of cloudy spirits jolted his innards. Holding his emptied glass to the oil lamp – no generator at this hour – he said, ‘What is this stuff? What’s in it? What’s it made from?’

‘Turnips,’ said Ross. ‘Sheep fodder.’

‘No kidding! Whoo, I feel good.’

‘Ferment, strain, distil,’ said Ross. ‘There’s nothing to it.’

‘And chuck in a little sheep shit,’ said Max, holding his glass out for a refill.

Time for a sing-song, then.

Tiger hummed as Ross strummed a guitar and Max droned the words of political fighting songs. Tiger was out under the stars and stumbling back in again – what a night. Heartbreak, hardship, god-fearing, bellowing appeals for the pity of slavemasters, factory owners and the rulers of the cruel world, and hand-clapping calls for the Lord’s pity – Oh, Lawdy Lawdy – finally came to an end.

The drink was fiery without the burn. The night starry and clear without end, spiralling on its axis poles. Loyalty and attachment were Tiger’s lodestones. His friends were friends for life. Unending was what Tiger meant when he carried on to Devlin earlier in the bar – a feeling of going back, of what passed from generation to generation, never the same with each handover, but stamped with a mark of belonging.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, STEPPING DOWN
from the rail motor at Inverarity siding after his night and half a day’s travel, Kyle Morrison saw the earth dropping off around him into the familiar hugeness of his workplace.

It was a plain as wide as the upward-gazing eyeball of the earth. A car appeared from the direction of Inverarity and disappeared under a pillar of dust in the direction of town.

Kyle waited. Devlin was late. Nondescript coolabahs and lignum swamps fanning out from steaming bore drains were low interruptions to the eye. Smoke slanted across the horizon. A fire was creeping through the Swampland Block. It had burned the whole time he was away.

A second car appeared, grew larger, and edged along below the platform, stopping. It was Kyle’s Humber Super Snipe.

‘Who was that?’ said Kyle when his overseer, Ross Devlin, took his bag and threw it in the trunk.

‘Max Petersen and a friend of his, Tiger Yeomans. They stayed the night.’

‘Good for them,’ said Kyle.

Of course, Devlin had the right to have anyone in his quarters he wanted to have there. There was no contesting it. His friends could come and go as they pleased. They could churn up the dust, wear out the road, bang their car doors at three in the morning and blow their horns as loud as they liked, setting off back to wherever they came from.

It settled Kyle to notice, from the window of the Humber as his overseer drove, a Western Brown sashaying along a bore drain. Suborder Ophidia, Serpentes. Order Squamata, many families of same, a field of study beating breeding stock for interest.

Kyle gave more attention to a snake, a hawk, a swallow or a lizard than he did to Ross, who instead of getting on with his report on the week’s work said, after a long silence, ‘When that fire’s finished in the Swampland Block there’ll be feed for a thousand head.’

‘Or more,’ said Kyle – the point being it would never happen. He would never allow stock in there, flush of green pick after wildfire notwithstanding.

‘Someone might,’ said Devlin. ‘There’s a certain party – might.’

‘To hell with your certain party,’ said Kyle.

‘Only trying to be honest with you,’ said Devlin.

‘Don’t see how,’ said Kyle.

He would rather think about snakes than engage in a wrangle that baulked his authority, such as it was.

Snakes had a good way of fitting around circumstances. If you didn’t alarm them or corner them they left you alone. Their beauties of scale, eye and fang were the province of the rare connoisseur.

A great day, it was, when Kyle had written to the herpetologists at the Australian Museum, sending them a draft of the paper that became ‘Reptilia of a Far North-West Shire’. One of each species had been killed, coiled and bottled in formaldehyde, photographed, prints made by Elisabeth in the laundry tubs and described by Kyle on index cards. The two, Kyle and Elisabeth, were henceforth known in reptile circles as ‘the Western Snakes and Legless Lizards’. The old boys chanted the collective noun to each other in golf club bars. Christ, they were a pair, those two, Kyyyyle and his missus.

‘Stop here,’ said Kyle, at a corner where three fences met. Devlin thumped the brakes.

It was a rise, a hump in the road giving a view into the scattered trees and long, bleached Mitchell grass of the Swampland Block. There was a glimmer of clay-coloured water and a white-faced heron beating its way along. A strainer post cut from a box tree bled gobbets of sap from under strips of shaggy cambium. It was months since Devlin and the jackaroos had heaved it into the ground under Kyle’s direction.

Kyle climbed from the car and approached the strainer, holding a matchbox. He walked with the careful tread of a powder monkey. He could never come anywhere near the Block without pouncing on something or other, winged or scaled, feelered or fanged, putting it into a matchbox, trapping it in a cigar box or wriggling it into a sack.

He climbed back into the car, clutching his find, and they got going again. Dry of speech, dry of skin, though never entirely dry of hope, Kyle held to his swampish preferences against the policy of the Inverarity directors, led by his cousin Rosemary MacKinlay and supported by his overseer, Devlin, to open the Swampland Block to cattle. He kept turning his head back, looking at the diminishing line of trees.

‘The point is,’ said Devlin.

‘The point is
never
,’ said Kyle.

The Swamp was a labyrinth of billabongs, channels and dry, grassy islands. It was a place of eagles’ nests, brolga dances, hawk and night-owl patrols, dove and pigeon belfreys, and butcher bird choirs – the closest place to paradise on earth, and the fact that Devlin felt the same except for the matter of getting stock in there cheered Kyle on those days when it didn’t irk him almost to death.

Billabongs and sandy islets led into a system of muddy canals. Floods, when they came, lasted for months under hot blue skies. Swollen creeks coming down from Queensland broke their banks with a nudge and a trickle. Birds flocked there – ducks, herons, waders, swallows the harbingers of good. Pelicans glided through the haze of the setting sun. Mud-caked frogs drummed in waterholes. Squamata made the strike. Kyle poled a flat-bottomed boat along, a gondolier mute with unsung song wearing a flat Akubra. The old boys rolled their eyes and Devlin looked leaden-lipped when Kyle spoke rhapsodically, which is to say, spoke a dozen words on the subject of the Swamp, then fell quiet. His eyes told the rest, an enlivening of every scruffy nest and rotted hollow.

Kyle’s cupped hands held the matchbox like a treasured gift.

‘What’ve you got there?’ said Devlin.

‘An assassin bug,’ said Kyle, sliding the matchbox tray open a quarter inch to give a blurred view of something bigger than an ant, smaller than a spider, struggling and scraping the cardboard. Ross was obliged to take hold of Kyle’s wrist and steer it back to his lap before they ran off the road.

‘It’s a bug,’ said Kyle, ‘that injects a lethal spittle into its prey. It liquefies the guts so they can be sucked out.’

‘Like a milkshake?’ said Devlin.

They drove in their typical silence then, never entirely comfortable, a silence never entirely sucked dry of feeling or even of understanding.

Kyle could hear Devlin’s jaw cracking, his teeth grinding, saliva sucked back into the sinuses as he matched Kyle’s silences, or tried to.

The homestead lay below the horizon as they counted the telegraph poles reaching towards it, a rusting wire drooping almost to the ground between each ceramic insulator. It was a party line, where everyone learned everyone else’s business and listened when they said they didn’t. Devlin made sure he never rang anyone close to him on it. When he had anything personal to say he drove to town and wedged himself in a phone box.

On the road past Inverarity Bore, skeletons of sheep lay dark with carrion crows calling out ‘Carkle’, Bounder’s hymn to the crow.

Wrenching his mind to work, Kyle resolved to lift the lid from the conversation with Devlin if he must. He opened his mouth, closed it again.

‘It would be a good idea,’ Kyle said, ‘for the jackaroos to come out and pick the dead wool, and while they’re at it, to get the dead-uns out of sight of the road.’

‘In time for the next visit of the MacKinlays?’ said Devlin, to which Kyle gave assent, in silence, but with a mental verse:

The crows of the world are gathered in

On the rim of Australia wide,

Their flashing beaks and feathers’ gloss,