The Following (23 page)

All the way round the yards and through the outbuildings Kyle talked about Powys. Everything he couldn’t say to Powys he said to her. How glad he was to see him. How Powys was like a brother to him, or a son.

He showed her the famous pokerwork,
Vale Salve
, and the sandy ring where Powys broke in a brumby. There was an air of desolation to the empty quarters with the workers away for the day. Only one of the huts had a sense of life – Margaret said so.

‘Oh, it’s Devlin’s,’ said Kyle, as if what she’d said was predictable.

There were curtains, admittedly calico, window frames warped but freshly painted, an air of life and anticipation framing the hut.

‘Ross Devlin’s a difficult cove. You’d like him, no doubt.’

‘Why is that?’

‘He’s on your side of politics.’

‘That’s not guaranteed,’ said Margaret. ‘Look at Powys.’

‘What do you mean? “Look at Powys”?’ Kyle peered at her from under his hat brim.

‘Well, we get on,’ said Margaret.

A dust devil blew up and they held on to their hats, watching the spiral spin and weave through the laneways until it died out. When it was gone a dust haze settled over the area. They spat grit from their tongues.

‘Dirt,’ said Margaret.

‘I’m being asked to give it up,’ said Kyle.

She knew what he meant. The past week had prepared her. The acid, unlikeable necessity of unremitting Australian dirt as it rolled back under the wheels of a moving car and brought itself up as greatness.

‘Can you?’

‘No.’

‘Will you?’

‘Possibly.’

‘
Must
you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s all so hard,’ said Margaret, giving his arm a squeeze. ‘Hard to talk about.’

But he did. To her.

It had all been explained to him, he said, by Powys on the phone last night. It was all very rational, generous and kind, all laid out point by point, square boxes ticked on a sheet of lined paper against handwritten paragraphs. The offer. The buyer, the stranger to the district, all cashed up. It was not very far from what Kyle had sometimes thought might do for him, a sort of nature reserve, ‘private’, you could call it, a freehold few acres not too far from town on the far side of the Swampland Block where you could throw up a house of sorts and get out over stony ground to the sealed road without getting bogged every time it rained. Elisabeth liked the idea. It was just what she’d hoped.

‘And you, Kyle?’ said Margaret encouragingly. ‘You hoped for . . . ?’

‘Bounder, my father; he never had anything you could call greatness,’ said Kyle.

Kyle heard the old boys calling it his hobby block and Bounder laughing from the grave in a last realisation of Kyle’s complete possibilities in life.

T
HAT NIGHT IN BED
E
LISABETH
whispered marriage plans for the two in the garden bedroom while Kyle lay on his back, saying nothing but thinking of the mare he would saddle up in the morning. The mare of flighty reputation.

In that house of single-frame walls there were never any night secrets. Floorboards creaked and a door-catch rattled. There came the squeak of bedsprings, one person moving over as the other got in. There came a rhythmical unmistakable thrust. Block your ears, Kyle Morrison, to the sound of a lovely young Indian girl being ravished by General Custer.

The echo of bedsprings persisted like X-rays, gamma rays, cosmic waves sweeping through the starlit home paddocks where the places Kyle liked to think about before going to sleep – the reed beds, the billabongs, the owl haunts of the Swampland Block – were wiped from existence. He thought, an asthmatic straining for breath,
I need to get there, to the Block before it’s finished.

After a time he heard Elisabeth quietly breathing, sleeping. He could hear his loud heartbeat, then, the irregular clippety-clop of its rhythm.

Down in the overseer’s cottage Ross Devlin strummed his rickety guitar:

My name is Juanano de Castro

My father was a Spanish Grandee

But I won my wife in a card game

To hell with those lords o’er the sea.

Well the South Coast is wild coast and lonely

You might win in a game at Cholon

But a lion still rules the Barranca

And a man there is always alone.

I
N THE MORNING, AFTER EVERYONE
gathered for breakfast, Devlin asked for a quiet word with Kyle, who felt the sour breath of his overseer in his face, the smell of instant coffee still hot in the throat.

Kyle’s eyes rolled back, he pulled his head away as Devlin referred to the previous night’s business, the title deeds and their reversion to proper owners being the topic. There’d been drinks, a subdued air of triumph in Devlin as he swanned it with Powys and Margaret, and then, when Rosemary and Brian MacKinlay arrived, with them.

‘You and Rosemary have been thick on this for years,’ said Kyle.

‘I know you think that,’ said Devlin. ‘Not Rosemary. Not cooking anything up. I learned all about it from the bloke who works with the down-and-out. Then I passed it on. He’s all for the underdog down to his red corpuscles. The bloke, Max Petersen, his people have the bottom pub, the bloodhouse, The George.’

‘Nobody calls it “The George”,’ said Kyle.

‘You’re right.’

All those times Devlin jammed himself in a phone box making calls, thought Kyle. To Rosemary MacKinlay? To a bank manager? No. To a solicitor’s office and a juvenile agitator, a bloody little bloodhouse louse, Max Petersen, lining up ownership deeds subpoenaed from city vaults and faxing them to Rosemary and the Directors from a rotten party office, a trade union cell, in the name of a woman who’d have been hung as a wild young girl if she wasn’t so favoured. Well, it had to come this. History takes its revenge. A great shrinking down that operated in Kyle’s lungs like a closing fist.

‘That girl in the paper,’ said Devlin, ‘the one your visitor, Margaret, wrote up. The one that everyone, all of you, calls a slut.’

‘The Milburn girl?’ said Kyle.

‘Jenny. She’s my fiancée,’ said Devlin. ‘We had a bust up, she’s back, it’s all right now. We’re getting married.’

‘Christ, but she’s a woman,’ Kyle said, about to say something spiked, bitter and hurtful to his overseer.

Kyle then adjusted his words and made an acknowledgment: ‘She’s a woman of grace.’ And he’d almost said ‘of race’.

Any man composed of animal spirits – half-stallion, half-centaur – would feel a sacrifice worth making for a spell of insensible happiness with her.

‘Good on you, Devlin. You are in for a ride.’

Three qualities Ross Devlin appreciated in Kyle. His love of horses. His defence of Powys Wignall’s books. And his unpredictable heart. Ross only ever called Kyle boss when any of the three came up. They were the anodynes to their thirteen years of awkwardly getting along.

‘Get me the mare,’ said Kyle.

‘The black mare?’ asked Ross, knowing very well which mare Kyle meant.

‘The black.’ Kyle nodded.

‘Righty-oh, boss.’

Something was hard to put a name to, that Ross Devlin wanted to guard Kyle from, but could not, a semi-suicidal attachment to what was likely to kill him dead – untamed horses, venomous snakes and that sweep of land intermittently flooded, the Swampland Block.

‘Look,’ said Devlin. ‘Me and Jenny, after we’re married, we’re going to ask you something, if we can’t go and live on the Swampland Block.’

‘Ask? Ask me? Why me? Ask someone who owns it,’ said Kyle. ‘Ask your confounded Milburns. Ask her. Ask Jenny Milburn. Ask the old bat – your Mrs Luana Atkinson. Ask your lawyer friends. Your pinko-loving pinko set. Isn’t that the point?’

‘S’pose so,’ said Ross.

‘Ask Powys Wignall,’ said Kyle.

It was the saddest statement he’d ever made. He regretted saying it. There was no greatness in it. But there you were. It was out.

There was just one matter that Kyle had the power to take into his hands, his very own hands now, and that was to kiss Elisabeth goodbye as he did every morning of his working life, take a pair of well-softened reins into his grip and go on horseback towards a blurred line on the horizon, that opened out when you reached it, into a maze.

‘Get the mare,’ said Kyle, giving the order crisp as a stockwhip crack.

He pulled on the gaberdine riding coat that raked the ground when he walked, making him look a galoot in the saddle on those occasions when he rode under the beating rays of the noonday sun. Ross Devlin walked fast, keeping up with him. The black mare was being brought up to the horse yards. Ross followed orders on that, the boys brought her up, hardly able to contain her, so untamed and untameable she was.

And that was it for Kyle despite his having another three months grace on full salary, such as it was, before moving out, then half salary, half pension for two years while he set himself up on 250 acres of the Swampland Block that would be made over to him and Elisabeth freehold. His riding coat rubbed against the mare’s flanks with a sound like tearing paper.

P
OWYS
W
IGNALL FINDS THE WORDS
that are unsayable till he says them, words that don’t console Elisabeth at all. Nor any of them much. But still Powys says them, and while he speaks Margaret Poole takes Elisabeth’s hand. It is almost a year since Kyle disappeared.

The Arcade is filled to the side doors and overflowing outside. Who knew Kyle had so many friends? The dead find them. As soon as the words are over there’ll be food and drink.

Smel, Cut and Spud can’t believe it. They always thought they were immortal – the whole four of them, including Kyle. Nothing in their experience of ageing and decay ever told them otherwise.

Kyle has not been found. Into the Swampland Block he went at a gallop. More like a bolt. (It will be forty years before remains are unearthed. The discoverer will be Ross Devlin, a man in his seventies, poking around in a midden and pulling a jawbone with a tooth attached from the bank of a billabong.)

Powys stands on a rough-hewn bench and reads out loud his conjectures that are everyone’s, if they really knew Kyle. Everyone’s except one’s.

‘No,’ says Elisabeth under her breath. ‘This is very impertinent.’ Powys’s words are too strong for her. Always have been. Powys has a right to them, but she hates them. Only she really knows, only she really loved Kyle, only she really that morning of his going had love enough in her heart to let him go. Watching him crack his breakfast egg. Watching him blow steam from his hot cup of tea. Watching him collect the last toast crumb with a tongue-wetted fingertip.

Catching Elisabeth’s eye, Powys lifts his jaw and she nods, almost imperceptibly, as if to say,
Well then, get it over with
.

So Powys gets to the point. Makes it happen.

And they all are there, on that morning unrecoverable from time.

‘The prickly bush rakes along the mare’s legs,’ says Powys, ‘scrapes her flanks. Kyle’s too good a horseman to allow it, he lets her go. Sends her home with a whack on the rump. The untameable mare, tamed, is home by nightfall.

‘On Kyle goes, his majestical riding coat reduced to tatters, and what does he care. He throws it off, it’s found. He gets rid of shirt, trousers, boots, and they are found. He takes off his wristwatch; it, too, is found. He breasts the waters of the shallow billabongs of the Block and he’s laughing.’

‘Yeah, he’s laughing,’ says one of the Milburn relations,
sotto voce
, a big happy overweight bloke who knows the Swampland Block like the back of his own hand but if he ever saw Kyle in that great expanse, the shadow of a man delightedly passing through, he’s not saying. If Kyle ever saw him he never mentioned it either. This man’s the first Milburn ever invited up to the house. The first in its history. He used to be invisible before. His relation Jenny Milburn, she’s there too, with her husband, Devlin.

The thought is that either Kyle drowned, or it was deliberate what he did next: he went into the water. Powys implies it was deliberate. Not so deliberate as inevitable. Anyway, hardly a whim.

Elisabeth thought,
Oh, that’s brutal, but there’s justice in it
, as the beginning of her married life came back to her, in the memory of a tidal wave rising clearly into view.

‘Now Kyle’s sculling on his back,’ says Powys, ‘moving through the muddy waters as the bright clouds glide over his head. Water splashes up past his ears, goes over his face but his face emerges, and dunks, emerges, and dunks, not washed clean because each time a line of silt gets deposited, and with it the small life of the place, tiny crustaceans and whatever, waterbugs, snails, and he thinks it was like this when he was a really small child, a happy enough boy before the rhymer ever pounced on him and he was left with an empty matchbox to fill.’

This gets a laugh. The rhymer. The pounce. The matchbox emptied of matches.

There’s quite a lot more, including:

Kyle, our eyes are on you

Coo-ee, the future’s sound

Hear, the stockwhip’s fracture

Kyle, you’re homeward bound.

And then everyone has their say, and the old boys sing the school song –
boom chicka boom
, and so on.