The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (17 page)

After breakfast, Dithers asked Abotomy if he might explore the area.

‘Best not to go too far from the homestead, old chap. The brigalow, wilga and leopardwood
are thick hereabouts, as are the taipans and tiger snakes. I can't spare a man to
guide you. You'd be doing me a great favour if you stuck to the home paddock. Portia's
got an interest in birds. Maybe you could do a bit of birdspotting with her?'

That afternoon a rather costive Dithers set out across the paddock with Portia, who
was armed with an enormous pair of binoculars. The bush behind the homestead was
badly knocked about. Barbed wire and other rubbish made the going a little hazardous.
But there were plenty of birds. Quite near the house they saw a family of blue wrens,
the brilliant markings of the male almost metallic in the sun. The little fellow
was so bold and sprightly that he made Portia laugh. She reached into her pocket
for a few crumbs, and scattered them at her feet. To Dithers' amazement, the creature
came right up to her, its tail swinging from side to side as it pecked at the offering.

‘I'm worried for the birds, Courtenay,' she lamented. ‘This
battué
could wipe out
a lot of them.'

They walked back to the verandah, picking their way between piles of discarded kerosene
drums, sheets of tin, and timber. ‘I wish Chumley would get the men to clean it up,'
Portia said, pointing to the debris. ‘It attracts snakes, and I'm terrified of them.
Especially with the baby coming.'

The
battué
, it transpired, was a major undertaking. Nets had to be put in place,
beaters gathered from the surrounding stations, and invitations sent to the local
squattocracy. Dithers found himself with time on his hands. But what pleasures there
were in Abotomy Hall! He revelled in the leisurely mornings spent lazing in his double
bed with its silk sheets and eider-filled duvet. Through the wide French doors he
could watch the changing shades of the Australian landscape as the sun rose.

And Portia was, if anything, too hospitable. She would invariably bring him breakfast
in bed, then perch on the edge of the mattress and chat with him as he sipped his
coffee and ate his fried eggs. The cooking must have been a priority for her, he
thought, for she would arrive in her nightdress and dressing-gown, from which her
full breasts seemed determined to escape. They provided, Dithers secretly thought,
the most splendid sight of the entire property.

‘Courtenay, what's happening in Sydney these days? What are the fashions at David
Jones?' Portia asked, her black eyes opening wider than ever. ‘And
pleaase
tell me
about the opening of the harbour bridge. Was it really as fabulous as the radio reports
made out?
'

Courtenay was so touched by her yearning for the city that he invented things to
entertain her: the scent of a perfume he'd
detected in the crowd at the bridge opening,
and a visit by a foreign dignitary to the museum. He described in detail the dresses,
entertainments and chatter of the big smoke.

‘Oh, Courtenay, I miss it all so much,' Portia exclaimed after one particularly vivid
account. Leaning against him, she seemed almost to swoon.

It was, unfortunately, at this precise moment that Chumley Abotomy sauntered past
the French windows. Portia did not see him, but Dithers caught the steel in his eyes.

That evening at dinner, Abotomy seemed to be in the best of spirits. ‘Early morning
tomorrow, old chap,' he said to Dithers after the meal. ‘Need your help with a job.
Got to lighten off a horse.'

Dithers rose at dawn, and was a little surprised to find his shoes innocent of paper
balls. He met Abotomy in the parlour, dressed in his work clothes. ‘Delighted to
help with the unloading, old thing,' Courtenay said, ‘but don't you have hired help
for that sort of work?'

‘There are some jobs, Dithers, that the man of the house must do himself,' Chumly
replied grimly as they walked towards the stockyards. ‘Like defending a wife's reputation.'
He looked Dithers straight in the eye. This alarmed the curator, who felt that perhaps
Abotomy had read too much into what he'd observed through the French windows.

They were now at the stockyard, where a beautiful black stallion was tied to a fence
post. Two workers sat on their haunches beside a small fire. As Abotomy approached,
they jumped into the enclosure, and threw the horse onto its side.

‘Come here, Dithers. I want you to see this.'

The men tied the horse's legs. Abotomy crouched beside the creature and grasped its
silken black scrotum in his left hand. To Courtenay's horror, the squire took a blade
from his pocket and cut deeply into the bulging purse. In a moment it was over. Two
bloody spheres lay in the dust beside the screaming beast.

‘First and only warning, Dithers. If I ever see you near Portia again, I'll take
the greatest pleasure in slicing
your
balls out with this knife.'

Abotomy stomped off to breakfast, leaving Dithers stunned. A cur shot from the shadows,
wolfed down the severed organs, and fled growling into the half-light.

Chapter 14

After this singular incident, Abotomy showed nothing but civility to his guest.
But Dithers couldn't relax. There was the problem with Portia, and the problem with
the dunny. His perpetually costive state left him in a sort of delirium, and whatever
sleep he found was filled with bizarre dreams. He would often close his eyes only
to find himself wandering an enormous toilet block, inside which was hundreds of
cubicles. He'd enter one to find that there was no toilet paper. Another lacked a
seat, while another had no toilet bowl at all. But worst were the cubicles filled
with spiders, or those in which Abotomy crouched, grinning maliciously, knife in
hand. Dithers would wake with a whimper, grasping his crotch and wishing desperately
for relief. Somehow, most mornings, the newspaper
would be there in his shoes. He
had no idea how Abotomy got into his room without waking him. What had started as
an odd practical joke began to take on a terrifying aspect.

One morning Dithers awoke in the predawn light to a peculiar sound: ‘
Faark
,
faark
,
faaaarkkkkkkk
.' Was it the dying cry of a foul-mouthed shearer?

‘My feelings exactly, old chap,' he said as a large black bird flapped away.

Over breakfast he mentioned the strange call to Portia, who told him that it was
the cry of the little crow.

‘Oh,' said Dithers. ‘I'd been told that the crow sounds like
Wagaa, wagaa
.'

‘That,' Portia replied, ‘sounds like the Australian raven to me. You find it further
east. Our crows are not so civilised.'

She was secretly pleased to discover that Dithers was taking an interest in the feathered
tribes.

The evening before the
battué
, men began arriving at Abotomy Park. The entire district
had been invited. A few of the men (and the visitors were almost all men) wore suits
of varying vintages and states of repair, but the majority were dungareed and check-shirted,
their sartorial elegance extending at best to the occasional neckerchief. A beast
had been slaughtered and an enormous roast sizzled in the oven. Cauldrons filled
with boiled pumpkin and potatoes, and piles of tinned peas completed the feast. As
the multitudes gathered on the verandah, beer, cooled
in a Coolgardie safe, flowed
freely.

‘I hear you're a curator?' asked an arrogant-looking young fellow, who had already
downed several beers.

‘Yes,' replied Dithers. ‘I'm here to assist Mr Abotomy with the preparation of scientific
specimens. What's your name?'

‘Duggerton, Denis Duggerton. We don't see your type out here too often. You can start
your collectin' with the wild dogs. And the blacks, though the pioneers did a pretty
good job with them in this district.'

‘So I hear.'

‘My family shot sixty bucks off the property. The does and pikininis got away, but
we got 'em all later, with damper. The whole mob were feasting on stolen sheep.'

‘That, sir, is murder. Foul murder.'

‘It had to be done. Our forebears dealt with them and the wild dogs the same way.
Shooting and poisoning. Just put the strychnine in a dead beast, rather than a sack
of flour. If it hadn't been done not a sheep would be left alive. And our claims
to the land might have been doubted.'

Dithers thought back on the prickly pear, rabbits and foxes that afflicted the country.
It was as if the land itself had been poisoned and was vomiting up great plagues
of bile in its distress. But these colonials were surely the most pernicious plague
of them all.

‘I am astonished that anything has survived your campaign of extermination,' Dithers
replied.

‘Not much has. Nowadays the wild blacks have been pushed back as far as the Alice,
and the dingoes are pretty thin this side of the Darling. If it wasn't for do-gooders
like you, we'd have
finished off the lot of them long ago.'

Duggerton walked off in search of another drink. Bastion, who had been listening,
caught Dithers' eye. He led him to a quiet corner.

‘My grandfather always said the blacks shot by old man Duggerton were the bravest
souls that ever lived. They stood their ground against nine armed whites on horseback,
for well over an hour. They fell one after another, giving the women and children
time to get away. The last man standing died facing the foe, a spear hafted in his
woomera, ready to let fly. They were braver than the Spartans, Grandad reckoned.'

The dinner gong sounded, and the men crowded around a trestle table stacked with
food. Each took a plate and stood where he could on the verandah, wolfing down the
tucker. As the crockery was cleared, Duggerton produced a violin. The strains of
‘The Lime-juice Tub' were accompanied by wild cries, clapping and stomping, and soon
the men were dancing jigs and reels. Portia and Chumley even managed a round to one
of the more sedate tunes, to the applause of all.

At ten o'clock Abotomy cried out, ‘Men! Port and cigars in the smoking room!'

Dithers had no wish to follow. He went to his bed as guffaws and sniggers emanated
from the room. The shooters were presumably admiring Abotomy's antiquities.

When Dithers woke in the morning, he knew he could not participate in the
battué
before emptying his bowels. And that meant facing the spiders. Perhaps if he closed
his eyes, he thought, he could relax sufficiently to perform in that den of venomous,
eight-legged horrors. He made his way towards the
dismal structure, opened the door,
shut his eyes, and sat down. With growing anticipation he remembered the need for
paper. Was there any in the place? He opened his eyes a crack. An old newspaper,
ripped into squares and hung by a string from a nail on the back of the door. He
went to grab a sheet, just to be ready, when he saw, crouched on its reverse side,
the most horrid, hairy spider he'd ever encountered. He leapt up, throwing the sheet
to the ground. Then the outhouse exploded.

The sound was still ringing in Dithers's ears when he realised that he was painted
with the contents of the can. Yet he was euphoric, for the shock of the explosion
had finally loosened his bowels.

The door to the outhouse slowly opened—to reveal Portia Abotomy. She was dressed
in her night attire, and was holding a shotgun.

‘Oh, Courtenay!' she gasped. ‘My dear Courtenay! What have I done?'

Dithers found himself following Portia, trying to raise his fallen trousers with
one hand and covering his bespattered privates with the other. She led him into a
most splendid marble bathroom, where he showered. Portia fetched clean clothes. He
was drying himself when he heard her call his name.