Shearers' Motel Read online

  Hazel had learned to cook at the age of fourteen, when she had come north into pastoral country with her mother, Mavis, who believed that every shed had its ghosts. Hazel remembered her first time at Break-O-Day with Mavis in the dusty wastes of saltbush. It was twenty-six years ago. There was an owl that lived in the rafters behind the fireplace and watched people in daylight. Half the ceiling had caved in, and was mended with planks and ropes. Hazel looked up and saw the owl staring at her. It swooped low into the kitchen, down through the wide servery window, into the dining mess. It swooped silently back again, and Hazel had watched, fascinated, trying to hear if it made any noise at all, a whoosh or a creak of wing feathers. It was an owl she thought of when she couldn’t sleep, an owl with a perfect stare that she took down into her insomnia, into her cave depths.

  The happiest times of all Hazel remembered were with her mother in kitchens like this one at Break-O-Day Station, long echoing places with wood-fired ranges, brass tap handles, no washing-up tubs, Sunlight Soap and carbolic, stove-black, methylated spirits on her heat rash, and gentle consideration from men in those days. That was before Hazel had begun being tormented by the idea of men, always waiting around with stomach tension for one of them to finish work, to come and speak to her, to still the longing she had to be in his arms, and loving her.

  As a girl Hazel was pretty, with dark hair braided in two straight plaits, and widely spaced clear grey eyes, and freckles across her nose. She was still pretty at forty, still attractive to men — slim, hyperactive, voluble, a chain smoker. That wasn’t really her, but the front she showed. The true Hazel was somebody who was sinking, going down into the depths seeking a level where she could rest. She showered early each morning and dressed in clean clothes, a blue sweater and jeans in the early chill, carefully doing her face and brushing back her hair and tidying it with tortoiseshell clips before starting work pre-dawn. Her eyes were alert but she was always tired. She had worn herself out. She had breakdowns. Hazel frightened people now — made trouble. Any man who had hopes of her had to brave perpetual outrage. And then she would never be true to him.

  Someone complained about the mess-bill, objecting to five dollars fifty a day, saying their last cook had done it for four. The word got back to Hazel. ‘That must have been Jesus Christ,’ she raged, hurling pots and pans everywhere.

  When she heard a man’s footsteps coming down the side of the huts calling for smoko she came to the cookhouse door, kicked back the screen door, and let fly. She blew smoke in his face, put a foot out to trip him, threatened him with a carving knife, threw china plates at him — all because he came to tell her that he was there to carry the smoko tray across to the shed, if it was ready, because the guys were waiting.

  The guys were waiting.

  ‘They can bloody well wait,’ shouted Hazel. ‘Piss off out of my kitchen. Scram.’

  She made a statement once that for Australian and Kiwi men, women were low down in the pecking order. ‘It’s your booze, your mates, your sports and then, perhaps fourth or fifth, us women.’ And nobody, nobody took against her. Nobody said a word. They just took it.

  Her voice followed the man across the empty yard back to the shed. A cluster of figures stood in the loading bay, looking back her way. Confused, head-scratching men. How dare they make demands. She would show them. Just for once there would be no smoko at Break-O-Day station. Think of all the times Hazel had been disappointed over the years, put upon, underrated, spat on, ignored. Times when she had asked for something and not been given it. Imagine being told to cook for a photo. Times when she had worked all night making something that was fed to the dogs behind her back.

  Curious, in the hour that followed the outburst, how Hazel felt that people understood her at last. It was about time. After a while she heard the shearing machinery starting up again, a sound that was like a cluster of metal insects rubbing their wings together inside her brain, a sound that had always panicked her, worried her, made her sweat. The whirring clattering hum led to the inevitable hour of smoko, dinner, and tea. She lit a cigarette and stared through the doorway at the shed. Amazed that no one came back, that they left her alone.

  The team walked on eggshells in the kitchen and dining room. In private, the men bombarded the overseer with complaints. ‘Call this do-it-yourself deal lunch,’ they raged, ‘a tray of meat, a packet of stale bread?’ The overseer said it was impossible to sack Hazel cold. ‘We’ll see the shed through, and then I’ll quietly drop her.’ Hazel was too well known, and she had her troubles, her work- life went back to the time of old cherry-cheeked Mavis Hooper, her mother, who had died of a heart attack cooking breakfast in such a kitchen as this one.

  Hazel wouldn’t shut up now. Three weeks at Break-O-Day and she had had enough. The team was the worst she had ever cooked for. She knew she always said that but this time it was true. First week she busted a gut. Second week she waited for a word of thanks and appreciation. Third week she was wasting her life. The men eyed her sideways, ate in silence, trickled back into the kitchen and stacked their plates before skedaddling. If they paid any attention to a woman it was to a young one, a Maori girl who never said boo to Hazel. She was related to Packard. She had a tough laugh. It could be heard in the evenings, at the far end of the quarters, where a group gathered after tea, playing cards and drinking Jim Beam. Hazel had always tried to be friends with her, but the girl resented white women who went with their men. Stolen them was the word she used.

  ‘My grandmother reckons that pakeha are really tough. You know, not good eating.’

  Third week, last day. Hazel was just doling the stuff out. She wished Packard hadn’t been so brutal, just going off and getting another job like that. She wished he’d let her down gently, showing consideration. She gave them anything that came to hand, showing them what she could do when she really throttled herself back: meat with nothing fancy, dumplings and syrup, scraps and scrapings, soups made from dried vegetables, cobwebby egg powder used for bacon and egg pie, green bacon, black-spot tomatoes swimming in suds water, you name it.

  But when the overseer took her aside and told her she wouldn’t be going on to the next shed Hazel didn’t know what to think. It was just a void, there was nothing there. ‘This is not ordinary life, you know,’ she wiped her tears on her apron. ‘It’s something more special. It’s different. The next shed won’t be the same. It won’t be,’ she promised.

  The overseer looked at the woman and knew that he would lose a good steady team if he kept her on.

  AN IMAGE

  He was unable to leave the idea of his truck alone. It was like looking at himself in the mirror.

  The doors were dented from being jammed between narrow gateposts. The bonnet was bashed where a tree branch fell on it. The radio aerial and side mirrors were torn off by passing scrub. A coat hanger formed the aerial now, and it worked better. The headlights were punctured, neatly as if by nails. The taillamp was coated in dried mud. Between the splintered floorboards of the carrying tray, greasy black soil squeezed up and dried into ceramic chunks. The rotting timbers were so deeply ingrained with dirt that whenever it rained the truck sprouted barley grass.

  He slept on the back of the truck at night, and he draped his washing over it to dry. The bonnet wore his trousers, the roof had his shirt, his socks hung from the tailgate. Late at night he made contact with the world by tuning in to freak reception on the truck’s radio (which didn’t work in daylight at all), Moscow, Manila, Beijing. Their voices seemed more real coming out of the stars than the home life the man wasn’t sharing.

  Bits kept falling off. The inside door handles were gone. Inner wiring drooped under the dash, getting in the way of his knees. The heater didn’t work. Water from old rainstorms sloshed in door cavities for weeks, making a rusty stench.

  Parked anywhere, the truck sat lop-sidedly on the ground, as if right there would do, and no farther — as if it had already given too much, like a willing old horse, and was now heartsore, cantanke
rous, needing rest. He knew one day he would find it like that, and have to leave it alone for good, would have to hold off, not go for a reconditioned engine this time, or a sledgehammer job to smooth out dents, but let things be, or else risk some kind of penalty, a revenge for pushing, shoving, cajoling more life from life than was tolerable.

  When he bought the truck it was already old. His mechanic advised him: ‘Don’t touch it. It’s a heap of shit.’ But he closed the deal anyway, and then the mechanic brightened, co-operating in parts-transplants, finding a gearbox from the wreckers, a decent radiator and side mirrors and a handbrake handle and a sturdy gear-shift. To save panel beating costs he used a rubber-headed sledgehammer, attacking dents and buckles with exasperated, head-shaking pride. ‘Just don’t take this thing on long trips,’ he warned.

  Something was wrong with the steering. The truck pulled away from him, wanting to mount the road shoulder, plough into the scrub, abandon him finally. It always went ahead of him, taking the lead. The truck would die by a lonely roadside if it could, a natural wreck attracting rifle shots, firebugs, souvenir hunters, snakes, goannas, nesting swallows. Bits of eroded mineral would go flaking from battered duco, tyres perishing, windscreen glass going rheumy, marking the truck for what it always was, what it always felt itself to be in its bones, a rust-bucket wanting oblivion.

  In the time it took him in a small-town cafe to have a hamburger and a coffee, to read the paper and count the flies in the sugar, he half-expected the truck to have slipped away from where he left it parked outside. He almost hoped it would be gone when he was finished. He needed an abandonment he couldn’t quite manage through his own willpower. People offered him cash to get it off his hands (they said). He wouldn’t sell. He would rather have it stolen (he thought to himself), someone else’s impulse playing a part, someone else’s fascination involved, a new life without any interference from him or his intentions, a disappearance into the fullness of other lives. When he thought of what he wanted for his truck, he always remembered what he felt for his dog, and when he remembered his dog, tears pricked his eyes: to have her again would be to know where he was going, having a mute companion drawing him to life’s living edge, instead of feeling blocked at every new horizon, and ploughing through anyway, stretching it with him like rope.

  Seated in a sticky, Formica-topped booth, drinking milky cappuccinos made from Golden Roast Instant tasting like chemical swill, he wrote letters home:

  ‘Slept in truck. Full moon. Desert sky. Sheep going past crunching on sticks. Didn’t wake till seven — late. It was Sunday. Went back to the kitchen to find they’d eaten all the Fritz I was saving for sandwiches. This is always happening. I invent food traps. Idea is to leave a plate of what they want in the front of the fridge and hide the important portion in the back. Thought I could trust Harold but he came in and worked through the lot, leaving chicken bones in a small pile at the corner of the table.’

  ‘The classer said he was chased by Aboriginal women in the club: “Dance with me”. He said they weren’t prostitutes, “they just wanted someone like the rest of us”.’

  ‘A dog ripped into me when I went across to use the phone at the homestead. A Rhodesian ridgeback. Real hospitable idea. The homestead is surrounded by high chain wire.’

  ‘Two people I keep looking for again are the champion shearers, Rocco and Bradshaw. They are the heroes who started out like everyone else but overcame obstacles and now if anyone wants to excel, they’ve got a battle ahead of them, because these two are the best. They are fitter, smarter, cleaner-living, harder, and just plain better than anyone else. They are Pentecostal Christians. They don’t allow drinking in their sheds, and everyone is in bed and snoring by nine-thirty. I want to work for them. I’ll convert if I have to.’

  ‘Remember Quinn I told you about who was my age and wore a Hawaiian shirt, and danced on an ant bed shouting, “Look at this, everyone”? He was just off the plane, making his first trip outside New Zealand. He didn’t drink. And he wasn’t drinking, the blokes tell me, the night he went into the club at Bourke with Wade, both of them with women. Aboriginal women, and when they came out, still with the same two women, having a quiet night, truly, two young cops fresh off the plane from Sydney threw them against a wall and started to beat the shit out of them. Wade was out of it, and Quinn took a broken nose, a cracked jaw, and broken ribs (he found out later) till he couldn’t take any more, so he faced up to the cops and he told them he’d kill them, right there, if they laid another finger on him. The cops backed off. I told you Quinn was impressive. When I ask about him people shrug. He was last seen down in the Riverina somewhere, sitting on a barstool all weekend, nursing a drink. He must have had the love of somewhere new or someone new beaten out of him one way or another all his life, and I’d like to meet him again, to see if he’s bounced back from this one.’

  ‘Harold gave me time off and asked me to take the Hi-Lux to town for repairs and pick up stores. When I got there the repairs took too long so the garage gave me a car to come back in. That night Harold and Lenny took the car over to the homestead to use the phone, and when they came in late they asked me if I’d checked it had oil in it and I said I hadn’t. They said it had blown up on them. I said they should have noticed the bloody oil warning light. Harold said, “The trouble is, Cookie, the oil warning light didn’t show. She just went ka-boom and we had to walk back the last mile. She’s parked in the middle of the paddock back there.” Next morning I went out early and there was the car up at the shed. Nothing wrong with it.’

  ‘Louella’s boyfriend Aussie (an Aussie) came over at the weekend looking for her, and Harold told him she wasn’t there. She was in town in the pub. Aussie sat down plonk on the steps looking depressed. “She’s probably with that Lenny.” After a minute Louella came out of the wash-room and Aussie saw her.’

  Licking his envelopes and leaving a cafe, he would come out into the sun looking around for the post office, part-blinded by glare. And there coming into definition under a pepper tree would be the truck, a dog pissing on a wheel rim, the spare tyres secured on the top of the tonneau cover by octopus clips, the whole lopsided unit indifferent to its owner.

  In sheep country whenever he saw another truck resembling his, a ute or one-tonner only just holding together, only just scraping through each annual registration check and loaded up, almost visibly, with pots and pans, he recognised it as belonging to another cook. They passed on lonely roads with a finger raised in conventional recognition. That was all. Their trucks rattled past each other, and they ate each other’s dust.

  At Gidgee Scrubs Davo and Wade took his truck in hand. They lavished half a Sunday on draining the oil and replacing it, tightening the head gasket to minimise oil spray, adjusting the plugs and tappets. They drained sludge from the cooling system and flushed the radiator with clean rainwater. Then they took the truck for a spin around the dam, the engine unwinding smoothly. They handed it back with pride and he thanked them. They said they were going to the pub in Hungerford, a long drive. Was he interested in coming along? He wasn’t — he wanted nothing more than to lie in the camp, the only person there for a change, watching the hawks circle, and then, if he could, to have a sleep in daylight, a weekend luxury. He had been to the pub in Hungerford, he told Davo — forty years ago, with his father. They had eaten dinner there, slipping chop bones to dogs that bellied their way under the raised, galvanised iron walls into the dirt-floored dining room.

  ‘It’s still the same place,’ shrugged Davo.

  With great difficulty, Davo and Wade unshackled Davo’s three-ton truck from his caravan and with Barbara they drove the sixty kilometres to the border gate. He might have offered them the truck; he had the impression they expected it — they certainly deserved it — but something made him hold his tongue, and go tight and controlled inside. What if the truck died? He wouldn’t be there.

  There was time to spare. He drove off the road into the bush. It was a beautiful red sandridge with
a track winding through silvery acacias. He left the truck and started walking, trying to get his breath back and his heartbeat stronger after weeks of mutton fat and meat-smoke. An aimless hour later he circled back, homing on the truck’s presence — a glint of reflected sunlight in the subdued, thundery, olive-pale afternoon — finding a corella perched on the tailgate, wagtails picking insects from the radiator grille. He noticed he had a flat tyre and hardly dared approach because the truck seemed to have made its private choice, marking this place for its eternity of rusting away.

  But he took a risk, changed tyres, and went on. He knew the truck would exact its revenge, and make a demand on him in return for this one.

  Soon it was night, with lightning all round the horizon. He forced the pace. At last he was back on the asphalt again, warm splats of rain hitting the windscreen.

  It was raining but he wasn’t heading home this time, he was angling away down south, across into Victoria and South Australia where a shed was waiting in Australia Felix — with a motel phoned ahead, where he would arrive around midnight, a shower and a cold beer, a bed and clean sheets waiting. All the way down the arrow-straight road other cars came at him, their headlights filling the implacable darkness with explosions of light. Visibility was impossible through the old, hard glass of the truck, and there was a lot of traffic, one car after another emerging from the wetness and blackness of the night. Stretches of splintery light were all he could see before he was blinded. Sheets of water splashed up, blurring everything even more. He edged to the side of the road, slowing the pace, but the truck only slithered there, yawed and writhed, dangerously unstable. So he accelerated back onto the tarmac again, leant back in the seat and paid the price of going on: gripped the wheel in his fists and kept to a steady speed, never expecting to arrive anywhere.