Shearers' Motel Read online

  When he stopped at a gate a dust-trail drifted on past him, wraithlike and moody. He was looking for a signpost. He had a feeling of excitement, sniffing the grassy-dry air of midnight and listening to the immemorial shrill of crickets responding to his closeness, the nearer ones switching off, waiting.

  It was slow going then, through heavy sand. Dashboard lights made strange shapes on the windshield. Other vehicles materialised in his tiredness, yellowy-green trucks impacting and instantaneously dissolved by road bumps and slews animating the black glass. Against the driver’s-side window kangaroos came up, bouncing elastically, near-misses made possible by the weakness of the truck’s urinous headlight beams and the low speed.

  He stopped and walked around to keep himself awake. A piece of half-buried sheet iron rumbled under his boots. In the grass where he first walked as a child, at Bribbaree, were sheets of tin, old files bearded with rust, and blemished, dirt-caked horseshoes, long nails, dry leather boots and old harness-pieces twisted up like strange tongues. In his childhood dreams trucks climbed into the sky, flying past galvanised iron roofs and red clay chimneypots in widening circles of flight. He always woke feeling relief, drenched with gratitude at something he at last understood, that just by getting up to the right speed, on an appropriate slope, and by willing ordinary vehicles to fly, he could fly.

  He woke again, in confusion — where was he? — gripping the wheel, washed by a weak yellow bobbing light, the pale cast of a kerosene lamp, or a gas lamp, green windscreen reflections, asking himself in alarm: where were the Wilga sheds?

  He had fallen asleep at the wheel. The truck slithered, headlight beams pointing crookedly into the scrub and the stars jolting overhead. The stars tethered him to a purpose, brought him back. Why else had he come this way except to share their gravity-tug, to feel their comprehensive muted voices? No wonder he slept, taking in their guardianship so wholeheartedly, accepting their intimations of love.

  He came to the summit of a low range, hardly more than twenty or thirty metres’ inclination above the dark scrub. Mild as the elevation was, it had the effect of pushing the horizon down all around, creating a star arena. He had never seen such stars. He was at the centre of their wheel. They put him into their system, shifting across the cab of the truck as he moved along, cramming against the windshield, heaping overhead and cascading down and around and below. Stars filled the rear-vision mirror and reflected on the insides of the windows, stars overlaying stars in sheets and panels of smoky, frozen light. He was drunk from repetition and delay as he stopped and went on, stopped again to piss into a ground-fog of Mitchell grass and prickly shrubs with his head tilted back under the stars; stopped to sit on the heat-creaking bonnet of the truck, then leant back with his spine arching like a space-surfer, afloat on stars, surrendered to them, taken back. He wanted nothing but this rising into the star-sky.

  Now he saw the lights of Wilga homestead they were unwelcome. He came this way in order to travel endlessly.

  He drove slowly on. It was very late when he came to the Wilga Station gate. Cross-eyed headlights swept across stands of gidgee, fanned over a grooved, sandy road and climbed a leopardwood tree. Dull silver water tanks and a homestead roof came into view. Station buildings seemed serene, humble, awestruck under the night.

  Entering the shearers’ quarters he shone his torch into a cavern of galvanised iron. Nobody else was there. The Kiwis hadn’t come. Mulgawood stanchions were carved with initials. Mice disappeared behind an old stove. An acrid, gaseous stillness hung around two sets of paired fridges, their four doors yawning open, the interiors filmed with red dust, stacked with empty pickle jars. The wide kitchen table at the centre of the room had balls of mutton-fat congealed down the legs. Shadowed against the walls were slender meat-safes and coffin-like store cupboards with brass butterfly catches. Upturned aluminium saucepans, burnt black and buckled, were stacked in piles on shelving. Old Sunshine milk tins filled with soot-speckled dripping occupied the sides of a chimney recess. Feasts had been set and left here, consumed by a departed race of men, prepared and eaten until only the shadow of ritual remained, a broken idea of repetition and renewal, leaving only the stains, the leavings and the scrapings. Now he realised he had not wanted to come out cooking again. He had never wanted to come. Here he would never fly. Willpower alone had driven him out as far as this, the tug of renewal telling him to alter the landscape with unformed desire, asking him to feel the shock of doing something for no known reason and later, in the aftershock, discovering why.

  It was a lifeless room. He hardly seemed in it. He had wanted to become someone different in his own eyes, move out into the open, make the acquaintance of the stranger in his own life and travel with that person until desolation or recovery claimed him. Down at the sheds he had wanted to put his six-pack on the table and drink it through. He had wanted to reach for another one. He had wanted to invite a punch, ignore a warning, fall down, spew his guts out, crawl into bed blind drunk. He had wanted to disappear into an image of his own destruction if he could, coil the breath of his existence back inside himself, roll up the road behind, tear down the phone lines, send back the mail. What did he know? He had wanted to do damage, give hurt, keep scorching a pathway past the end of the last shed, the last signpost, the last creekbank, the last campsite, the last stark burnt-out chimney-place. He had wanted a death. He had found one.

  Now it was just things waiting.

  He opened the utensils cupboard. Flyscreened panels in the doors disintegrated to the touch. Tools of trade left by past cooks were spread on shelves lined with yellowing sheets of newspaper. Advertisements for chenille bedspreads and Vauxhall cars were visible, along with news reports from Seoul and Panmunjon. The cramped shelves held rusty tin openers, bent meat skewers, erratic pastry wheels, antique cheese graters. There were inexplicable mincer parts and fencing-wire toasting forks, flattened egg whisks and broken-handled knives. Everything lay there untouched because everything was incomplete, deficient, unusable. It was what was left after the tomb robbers had been through. And now he had come, watching out for the Kiwis’ headlights coming next.

  LAST HOUSE

  This was bad. The worst. Up at Wilga shed it was impossible to enter or even approach the doorway without repulsion.

  Dead meat with wool attached shone in the sun. Kites spiralled in the heat given out by galvanised iron. Blood blackened a concrete slab. There was offal in places. Green flies, blowflies, bush flies, maggots, meat ants, goannas on the move and crows thrashing around. There was always more death than could be rotted or taken away, more legs with wool on, more eyeballs in skulls, more carcases on the dump, in the paddocks, more stark ribcages and yellowing pelvises around the watering points. The pile-up of carcases exceeded any capacity on the part of scavengers to effect their removal.

  In the holding yards torpedo-shaped turds wallowed in a dust of fibres and shit-pellets and urinous burrs. There was a smell like body gas — a released sigh of disgust. He stood back with a forearm across his face. The shed was alive to the processes of death. A man’s body was found under here last year, a man the station children saw under the floorboards, in the shade. The last sundowner.

  He kept thinking of him — a man like a dead sheep, a traveller who had walked in from the road and found haven under the slats of a reeking shelter. When he entered the foulness of the shed he entered the last house, the ruin of home that had drawn him in at the end of his journey, offering an image of safety. Stink was his comfort and tufts of dags registered his last breath in the stillness.

  More shit on the steps going up, stamped, jagged on, with more wool attached like Mohawk scalps, making the steps dangerous to walk on.

  Inside the shed a breeze shuddered the loose iron walls. Here the wandering man was alive after his death, occupying the shadows where skins hung in rows on the catching pens. Hunched down in the sorting bins were serrated and grey fleeces of dead wool composing a fat back, a puffy face, spindly legs. Here was the d
welling place of repletion after capture and possession. Here was the house of a man feasted through to completion and starved to necessity. Here he came alive to himself in contradiction, breasting a death, enacting a prayer for continuation: was this who he was?

  He put an eye to the slatted floorboards and looked down as the children had looked down. They had seen only a dead sheep, said their father. Their mother told them it was all imagination. They were never allowed to say it clearly, even when the police Landcruiser drove away with a flyblown lump in a body bag.

  He could say it. Entering the shed he entered the house that was underneath the first house he ever knew. It was the house that was always coming into being, the house discovered after long mystification, long after the literal house of childhood was demolished and became a motel, and the yard tree with its stairway to the stars chain-sawed for firewood. Passion and neglect, drunkenness and euphoria were the raucous replacements for childhood’s warmth and the soft blaze of family love here. Gone was the voice that told him he could never be what he understood himself to be, that said what he felt was nothing, not worth understanding. At some time or other he had come along the road to the dead man’s shed and crawled under the slatted floorboards and lain there.

  He kept going deeper in. Orange peel and sandwich crusts gone hard as crockery were there. Piles of sliced bread bags were held down by a counterweight. Shreds of dirty towelling, cracked soap, a rusty handbasin. Strange filthy environment it was. Fly oil bit into his lungs. In the engine room was the nausea of diesel, with everything contained in four-litre plastic containers with the tops ripped off: improvised, temporary, made-do. Shit here too, shit where shit should never be, this being the far end of the animal universe, where machines were made to do away with shit but didn’t. Pelleted, shot-splattered, rolled, kicked, grey plasticine-trodden-in shit, delivered by a trembly-legged half-squatting shitting sheep that got away, he guessed, while men chased it — shit flung everywhere with blood flicked around for good measure, a mild sheep fallen down into this engine well become a wild sheep, knocking and trembling, caught against hot metal, eyes on fire. Murder and mayhem concentrated into an essence of oil slime, shit slime, grease slime. The cocky here could not go half an hour without a drink, he’d start shaking. He’d be down at the shed half an hour watching the shearing with his dog, and then he’d start to get the shakes and he’d be back up at the homestead.

  Up the next steps in a strange light. Louvres of green glass for some reason. Men and women would soon start work here, hangover-sour, the reek of entrapment in work-life going right up into the brain, into the emotions, into the prejudices. There was only one cure for stink, headache, depression, rage, and that was elation. Roar the scorn. Stride, reach, haul, hold. Fuck it if you felt like it and maim. To the cocky: ‘Get your fucking dog outa here or I’ll slice the count in two’.

  Work began. Enthusiasm cold on the hottest of days. Everything starting again, beginning over in the foul stink-pen of Wilga shed where the scum of an animal was left behind and accorded no value, its shreds of bleeding skin and tufts of wispy nothing hair, its rapid-fire terrified shits and staggery piss-floods blown away by a bellow.

  BEING A SHEEP

  It was not a happy time up there in the most desolate corner of the State. There were too many sheep on Wilga and they turned it into a desert in a good season. ‘I could tell you tales, really, I was appalled, absolutely appalled,’ said an English woman he met who had worked in the kitchen the previous year, but had shot through, going to work in the roadhouse fifty kilometres to the east. ‘My observations were such that I felt, you know, this is crazy, this is absolutely crazy. The world has passed them by up here.

  ‘Honestly, I prefer sheep to some people, the way they are.’

  Sheep looked at him dolefully from the yards beside the Wilga shed, where they were brought in during the day for the next day’s shearing. They were creatures with no reason to like him, or anyone else for that matter. Their mistrust was all-inclusive. They knew that at any moment the sky would fall in, and when it did, whose fault would it be? If they were human someone would ask what the problem was, but because they were sheep the problem was them.

  Dust choked them and they sneezed and coughed and made more dust with their trotting hooves. It was a fine dust composed of dried crystals of urine and shredded sheepshit and sand. Mixed in was a variety of spilled chemicals, jetting mixes and dips, bituminous and milky substances from old bottles, from the nozzles of plastic knapsack dispensers, and from rusted, leaking containers dropped under floorboards.

  All it took was a noseful of this pungent sheep-dust to rouse the feeling of dreary confrontation that characterised Wilga. It was the smell greeting new arrivals at the station gate, where sheep always gathered, mobbing up to an exit (as long as they weren’t made to). Workers who’d been away for a while spat and wrenched the flimsy gate-hinges back: ‘Fuckin’ sheep again’.

  Sheep packed into a corner and squashed each other. They stayed dead-still for a moment, then broke without warning, slamming against a far fence, bodies wedged hard, lungs straining, heads jammed up stiffly. Panic was in the air. Resentment. A crow-cry punctuated the moment.

  It was all overstated. Melodramatic. It couldn’t last. Sheep couldn’t be convincing about one passion before replacing it with another. Some of them began staring at the ground as if it were grass. They made the watcher into an illusion too.

  Then they went hard at it again, in their eternal scrum. They were locked into mob rule. Soon there would be an event involving mass numbers of sheep being inspired by other sheep to move farther and farther back until, at the last moment, when all seemed lost, a way of escape would miraculously appear. A mass exodus against the imprecations of men and dogs would occur. And it would be a phenomenon in their lives. It would be something new, something never before encountered: a way through, a release — a gate, a race, a ramp. Sheep lived in a hell of short-term memory loss. Tremendous relief would be expressed in a thundering and rattling of wooden planks, and they would pour upwards into the silvery light of the shed, possessed by heavenly thoughts — then shit but they knew this would happen, piss but their lives could have told them — and it would be the same thing all over again, mayhem and panic and slaughter in the shadows of the Wilga shed where men pointed and dogs harried.

  Nothing would ever change in the patterns of sheep. It was all written, all enacted, all fatal. No wonder sheep lay down and wouldn’t get up. They knew about death but were dumb in the face of it. They seemed always at screaming point, rolling their eyes, keeping their lips sealed. Their only wish was to be left alone to work something out. What had they done? What was their crime? Why was it always their day of atonement? Sheep led the life of abused innocents. They were all children.

  A shearer named Oxley with a pigtail like a pirate told anyone who listened that if they wanted to give him an enjoyable weekend they could just hand him a rifle and let him loose on the mob. ‘What cynic godhead made them?’ asked an Australian poet. Move a mob one way it elected another — get them to jump a stream, and they’d run with the current, go over a cliff and drown. Banjo Paterson wrote: ‘Merinos made our men sardonic or they would weep’.

  The Wilga cocky hardly ever smiled, but he grinned at Oxley’s rifle-toting plan. He was victimised by sheep. He must have thought, if only sheep grew something other than wool. If only their booms didn’t make him buy in panicky haste; if only their busts didn’t make him suicidal. There were times when he could have ‘shore them and shot them and still made ten bucks a head’. Sheep dragged him out to drive through paddocks of dead ones. Their diseases and their doggedness bled his days of hours. In a boom year there was flystrike, barley grass, corkscrew grass blindness, no good workers on tap, just the dregs. Because of sheep his wife and children stayed in the city, living it up for as long as they could, or merely surviving. And so he went mad from want of society, with just the company of sheep. Look at these shearers here,
these Kiwis and odd bods, never taking wool from the right places, leaving second cuts, ignoring the hocks, blind to the meaning of a man’s life, that is, his sheep — pissing off with a snarl if a legitimate word of criticism was breathed in defence of a man’s clip, which would fetch — what? Anyone know?

  Every wasted moment in the shed saw wool prices falling. Men were walking around scratching their arses when they should have been shearing. Every slow-down in the shed meant backlog in the holding paddocks. ‘It slows it all down and you’ve got less tucker for the following mobs to eat and then she sort of dominoes back,’ raved the cocky. ‘If that eats the paddock then all the rest have got nothing or it half-eats it out and the next mob half-eats it out …’

  It drove him back up to the house and back into the bottle again. He pulled the blinds. What he felt about sheep he shifted on to men. ‘Shearers are natural pigs. I know them. They look at the food and if there’s just the right amount they think, “Oh, that’s nice. I might want to come back for seconds”, so they take extra, and everyone when they sit down eats everything on their plate or tries to. But if there’s plenty they think, “Oh, well, I can always come back for seconds”, so they leave it. And then they’ll eat what’s on their plate, they’ll get talking to someone, forget they want more and therefore there’s a heap to chuck out, whereas if just the right amount is cooked you run short; you’ll never ever achieve the spot-on, everyone happy and there’s nothing to throw out.’

  He only wished he could din this into the heads of his sheep who ate through his dreams.

  To get away from Wilga faster they shore on the weekend. Oxley said his Aussie mates might come over on Sunday afternoon and check them out. They were staunch unionists. He’d seen them in the pub on the way up there. They had a Maori girl shearer with them. They had a feeling there’d be shearing on Sunday and were dead against it. Oxley just said, fine, come on over, stay for tea.