The Following (20 page)

She pushed them off. ‘Garn, you jokers – I have a boyfriend.’

‘So?’

It wasn’t Powys Wignall either. Though whether it was a boyfriend as such any more she doubted.

Alan Ward was a journalist, lean as a thread, hungry for fame, and that was the main thing between them – his work. They’d also crossed the Tasman together, having that to look back on as an example of alarming heroism, as far as their families in Kiwi were concerned. She would travel farther soon (always soon) to catch up to Alan when he was properly settled. That was the resolve. It had been agreed between them – they would sort themselves out in the fourth estate then shack up, making a go of it as a working pair, as lovers, as a couple, but would neither marry nor have children to bring into this weary world.

Now Alan was settled with a job on the
Manchester Guardian
and the time was right to say the word, but his weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly aerograms avoided the question, and Margaret’s pride prevented her from bringing up the subject of avowed intents (not exactly promises) anymore.

Margaret allowed herself, a little perversely lonely, certainly more than a little wistfully lost, to be befriended by Powys Wignall, cousin of the snake man of the NSW Far West and son of the dowager Lady Florence Wignall.

Margaret’s flat was up three flights of stairs and into a tiny kitchen like an upright coffin, with a bed that folded down from the wall. She’d never taken a bloke up there for a look except Alan and now Powys Wignall, showing how the other half lived when they lived just on words. A typewriter, a vase of flowers – daily refreshed – and a shared dunny and bathroom on the landing were all she’d ever wanted once she came over to this side, as she expressed it, arriving from Auckland to make a journalist’s life for herself in Sydney. She supposed Powys saw the photo of Alan pinned to the wall. They had never really lived together properly, but she liked implying they had. You needed credentials to be anyone on the platforms of the day, a louche attitude around morals, implied or put into play. Alan in the photo was leaning over the fence at the Gap, his felt hat tipped back from his narrow, white forehead. They’d never gone anywhere together unless for a story, she realised when he’d gone. No grace, nothing ever done just for her. Never a wayside wildflower picked and handed to her with a grin.

Margaret had grown up in ferny railway towns, up and down the North Island. She had piled in with her brothers and been farmed out, when older, to an aunt in the Hauraki Gulf islands, just as her mother had been in the previous generation. There Margaret discovered independence and the books and the pen that led her to composition. She was that prodigy of the
Auckland Star
who, Powys learned, had a boiler-stoker’s ticket, could drive a truck and change a wheel, liked to rock and roll, and, on the slightest pretext of naked emotional appeal in a written work, was given to tears.

‘God, that’s awful,’ she said the next time he showed her something. She wiped her eyes of tears. ‘He’ll never stop loving her,
ever
.’

This was a reference to Verlee Albury, the name Powys kept for his ex-wife, Beverley, his capacity for invention stopped short with only the ‘Be’ removed from the name ‘Verlee’ on the fictional page’s phonetics. Margaret had reached a point in Powys’s writing where few readers had, apparently, where she saw things Powys’s way and could not stop reading.

Margaret elevated novels to a social purpose and only regretted that Powys’s writing lacked one. Writing, Powys called what he did, as if a tool of betterment had no connection to anything but the hand that trailed the ink across the page.

O
N THE PARQUET FLOOR POWYS
walked,
tap, tappa-tap
. He stood at the front steps of The Condamine, leaning on his shooting stick. Margaret heaved bags into the boot of the car.
This will show me
, she thought around why she’d accepted an invitation to take to the road with him, what the consequences might be. Powys was anti-worker-movement of the sort who believed ‘The worker movement goes too far’, whereas Margaret was born into ‘The worker movement never goes far enough’. Her father, in his youth, had not been a Wobbly but had close Wobbly friends and returned to New Zealand to escape prosecution in Australia during World War I. Now here she was, allowing herself to be bought, as her brothers might say, by a bloated plutocrat.

In quest of her father’s lost past Margaret had done the rounds of archives, seeking surviving Wobblies for a piece, if she wrote it, that would test the
Weekly
’s resolve. It would have to be a woman Wobbly to get in, and she found one – and a tragic association with a dreadful, brutal hanging. The woman’s correspondence with a co-conspirator was said to have been burned by a politician, her protector, who married her off to a friend. The politician rose to the heights of power. In the end he died in her arms.

Powys’s leg killed him pumping the brakes and stepping on the gas. Margaret took over the wheel. The
Weekly
and its stablemate, the
Telegraph
, wanted stories from the bush and had put her on expenses. It was, she told herself, her motivation that gave the drive its meaning and her the upper hand. Being bought be blowed.

Except, as they set off, Powys said, ‘Hey ho for Meadow Flats,’ announcing his sister had papers for him to sign – his sister the maker of demands, it was best to get them out of the way – after which they’d start for the Darling proper, Margaret’s planned destination before Elisabeth and Kyle’s. They were due at Inverarity on Sunday, in five days’ time. It would mean more hours and longer distances with a diversion.

Except it wasn’t a diversion. It was the heart, what was left of it.

Because Meadow Flats, she learned, was where ‘Cornfounded Blight’ was written. In New Zealand, ‘Cornfounded’ was famous but regarded as stupid, the more so for being Australian. It made no sense. The words made no sense. Powys sang them as they drove, croakingly out of tune. They fitted the landscape, the scratchy, lumpy, bumpy rhythm. Margaret gave them that.

It was early winter – dry, cool, hazy – the blighted land out of tune with itself. The song – or was it a poem, or a ditty, or doggerel – was about creeks drier than a lizard’s guts and rivers draining off to saltpans. There was an underhand effect, and slowly but surely it made the ugliness of the drive feel beautiful.

A charred, charcoaled hand was dominant in the selection of hues. The road ran through low hills and small farms with tin sheds and thirsty paddocks. It was the reverse of New Zealand’s green plenty, and yet Margaret had been there before in the emotions of survival, she felt. It was a feeling that Australia had called to her before she ever came over – not as a place, but as an awareness – a feeling of being hooked to a love that rejected hope, that stuck to the bare bones of existence. That had those comical marsupials wearing waistcoats and spats too, and people like Powys Wignall in it, part of it, owners of it, belonging to it, but who never really properly fitted in, and they knew it in a way that made them affectionately shy and gruff. It was a country, a continent, irreducibly political.

The drive took six hours counting stops for thermos tea and slices of Big Sister fruitcake wrapped in sandwich paper. Margaret packed a picnic as a matter of course. She gained the impression that Powys’s vaunted Beverley never had, had never bothered knitting a sweater, tidying the covers of a bed, mending a husband’s shirts, never made ready for a long day’s drive by lining a wicker basket with a red-chequered cloth.

They came to ‘the town of Meadow Flats’ – Whistling Corner. In a cobwebby window was a placard in Rosemary MacKinlay’s handwriting telling would-be visitors they could come once a year to the Meadow Flats homestead garden, on a date to be advised, subject to a gold coin donation, weather conditions and factors beyond anyone’s control permitting.

On display were Bounder Morrison’s pipe, waistcoat, homburg hat, ink bottle, copies of his books and faded photographs with the Duke of York in 1928. The woman with sandy whiskers showing them around said that when Bounder sold Meadow Flats he never came back to thank them for all the stories they gave him. It made Powys glad to be an unread writer.

Late afternoon, navigating a public stock route past a travelling stock reserve, Powys suggested they pull over by the side of the road. It gave on to a view, a chain-of-ponds river and some rocky, tree-studded hills, as painted, said Powys, by Elioth Gruner in a famous fit of oils.

In the argument running along between them as they drove, Powys wanted to say that art had a high purpose, not a social purpose as Margaret said (with a serious frown), of looking and by that means wrenching points of view around so that subordinate to art social purpose might be discovered, or allowable, but was not the main game by any means.

Margaret’s day had narrowed down to what she’d been missing since Alan Ward left for the UK – the twist of warm feelings. Real conversation. She was making a friend of Powys. How they rattled on!

He was unlikely in every way. He grunted and groaned for no reason, and talked to himself as if half in a dream as she drove. When they stopped she wrote up her notes. She did so now, while he stepped behind a tree. She would soon have a piece ready, which she’d phone through to Sydney, that night if she could, about a pipe, a waistcoat, a homburg hat and some faded photographs of Bounder Morrison and the Duke of York, the man who became King George VI, at the opening of Parliament House in 1927. And of a painter of blue air evoked in a thistly paddock by a character she made from Powys – the travelling companion she would call ‘Adrien’ in her column and make known to her readers, but unidentified as to sex.

When they turned around to head back towards Meadow Flats homestead, hard by the drive-in theatre showing
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and
Jaws
, the sun was low in Margaret’s eyes and a hidden rock jumped up from the grass and wedged itself under the transmission. They worked together getting it out. Margaret put the jack in place and Powys pumped the handle. At the last moment the car slipped and the jack was jammed under a tyre.

‘We’re stuck,’ said Margaret, crawling out from under the rear end of the Holden with sticks and grass in her hair.

Powys sat on a stump and lit a smoke. Margaret sat beside him and they made themselves comfortable by leaning back to back. They waited to flag down a passing car but the road was empty and neither seemed to mind.

‘See where we are?’ said Powys.

‘Where?’ said Margaret.

‘Look – over there.’

A railway line on a high embankment ran past. They went to investigate, walking along the foot of it, catching burrs in their socks. A stone cairn, obscured by capeweed, marked where the former prime minister Marcus Friendly died, attested to by a brass plaque:

On the line where he made his way in life, below the house where he made his home.

They were expected at Rosemary’s, but Powys swiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘A cold beer would be good. When we get out of here, if we ever do, let’s go back to the Whistling Corner pub.’

‘What about your sister?’

‘Rosemary can come there.’

The way he paints her, if she wasn’t his sister
, thought Margaret,
he mightn’t have anything to do with her
. It was all in his tone of voice.

They were rescued by a farmer with a lamb tied to the pommel of his saddle. After he’d fetched his tractor and pulled them out they followed him over the hills to Whistling Corner. They were hungry. It was time to eat. So Margaret did not meet the sister or go to Meadow Flats and was glad there’d been no photographer sent down for the Meadow Flats garden, a remnant of the 1910s.

The publican called it dinner – steak pies taken from a warming tray and eaten while sitting in the hotel yard, at a table made from railway sleepers, under a honey locust tree, with Fountain tomato sauce dried black around the neck of the bottle and mashed potato, gravy and green peas.

When people made pilgrimages they visited Whistling Flats and had a beer in the hotel yard where the line went past. Opposing Bounder Morrison in fame hereabouts was Marcus Friendly. The pub owners made a point of who they favoured of the two. Powys scrutinised the walls, the ‘Friendly-iana’ hanging about – photographs, newspaper clippings. He’d rather liked the grey man, the idea of him, dealing with high matters but never without the feeling that below these were ways of thinking basic to the earth and mystical longing. Not that Powys had ever gone with Friendly in the voting booth.

Margaret said, ‘You don’t need to say that. It’s obvious. What would Friendly have made of
you
, do you think?’

‘
Scrr-rrit
,’ said Powys, running a finger across his throat.

They parted later in the upstairs corridor of the rickety hotel, going to their separate rooms, to their iron-framed beds. Later Margaret heard voices, a man and a woman’s, and Powys returning downstairs to the bar. Later still she heard bumbling footsteps coming up and waited for them to pause outside her door – as in the legend of lovers crossing floors with their canes – but there was never a pause to the lurching progress of the man. Margaret felt, again, that slide she didn’t know she was on, that had started when Alan Ward left on the
Galileo
and she was left clutching a bunch of streamers at the dockside, pretty darned certain they weren’t his.

‘I heard voices from the bar,’ said Margaret, when they came down for breakfast.

‘Rosemary operates at decibels, her whisper’s a roar.’

Margaret blushed at her own question. Things had changed since they sat on the stump with their spines resting on each other’s.

‘Did you say you had someone with you?’ she dared.

‘I did,’ said Powys, calmly appraising her. ‘I told them all about you. How I think you’re great. You’ll meet them at Inverarity. We’re all booked in.’

There was something else he wanted to say. His mouth tensed.