Shearers' Motel Read online

  Bertram Junior remembered a teacher he’d had at school. He was like him, and he said he had in fact been a teacher years ago, though not for long. ‘Too many tough bastards like you, Bertram Junior.’

  He came out with things like that. But he still gave Bertram Junior the feeling he had to watch his language when he was around him. When he burnt his hand on a baking dish while Bertram Junior was standing in the room one night, he said, ‘Fuck!’ and ‘Cunt!’ and dishes scattered everywhere. Bertram Junior blinked at this: ‘Cookie, you surprise me. I didn’t know you knew them words.’

  ‘You don’t know me at all.’

  ‘I’d reckon,’ said Bertram Junior.

  Things were okay, though. Except Bertram Junior knew they wouldn’t always stay that way. If you paid peanuts you got monkeys. In a shed you always had a feeling at the back of your neck about when and how things would go wrong. ‘No matter what happens, no matter how much time, thought, energy and hope I put into a job, someone will always let me down.’

  The bloke was busting a gut to get the meals on time, to make it look good, to not waste anything. It wasn’t surprising he was good at his job. You would expect a bloke like him to be competent, he was smart enough to run the whole shed — so why did he worry about it so much, and never entirely let go, and not smile more? Why was he like a tight fist that wouldn’t open out?

  ‘I won’t be awarding you any cooks’ premiership, Cookie, till you master the boil-up.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Kiwi food. I’ll give you the recipe one day.’

  ‘Give it to me now.’

  ‘Okay. Couldn’t be simpler,’ shrugged Bertram Junior. ‘You drop any kind of meat in the pot, but specially pork bones, plus cabbage and doughboys — what you’d call dumplings — and just leave it on the stove all week. Anyone comes in hungry, they just reach their hand in the pot and take some.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Bertram Junior.

  ‘Then why am I bothering with the stuff I’m cooking?’ he asked, opening his exercise book at random to a page of food notes. ‘Here’s what I’ve got for tomorrow. Pikelets. Chocolate biscuits. Coconut pudding —’

  ‘Don’t like coconut,’ said Bertram Junior. ‘What about soup? You never give us soup.’

  ‘In this heat? What about cold soup?’

  Bertram Junior curled a lip. ‘I’ve never heard of that.’

  ‘Meat fritters at lunch. Leftover chops. Potato salad. Stew for the main meal with cauliflower cheese on the side. You want me to go on? Custard, jelly, cream. Roasts, stews, grills. Then over to breakfast the next day, bacon and egg as usual, baked beans, toast, potato fritters …’

  Davo said he was the way he was because he was a watcher. ‘He’s on guard, Bertram Junior. He’s the proverbial fly on the wall. He’s noting down everything we do in that exercise book of his. Being a cook’s only a front. Watch out — he’ll put you in a book one day.’

  ‘Yeah, and get his face smashed in,’ said Bertram Junior, looking over his shoulder.

  Cookie was listening from the kitchen.

  Seeing that everyone in a shed got needled, it came round to his turn, sure as clockwork.

  ‘Nothin’ to do, Cookie?’ wasn’t a bad one, if he took an interest in anyone else’s work.

  ‘Note that one down, Cookie?’

  ‘Put that in your book?’ wasn’t bad either.

  Or more specially, ‘Don’t put that in your book’.

  ‘I’m not writing a book. I’m trying to learn a job.’

  Got him there.

  Get him on hygiene: ‘Are you making sure that everyone washes their hands, Cookie? Specially that rousie we got today. He’s a bucket of filth.’

  ‘I nailed up the back door coming in from the shithouse. He has to come round through the mess. That way I can see him at the tankstand.’

  ‘What if it’s dark?’

  ‘I can hear him.’

  Bertram Junior tried to show him consideration when he came in late for a meal, grabbing a dirty plate and piling food onto it: ‘Saves washing up’. He had never seen custard added to a plate alongside mashed potato. Bertram Junior chuckled, ‘You’ll see better’n that, if you stick with us Kiwis’.

  He unstrapped his apron and sat down for a serious talk.

  ‘So when’s the next shed?’

  ‘Easy there. We’ve only just started this one.’

  ‘Look, if you need a permanent cook — what about it?’

  ‘How permanent would you be? What’s your missus going to say about it, back on that farm of yours?’

  Bertram Junior narrowed his eyes, implying that married workers were a plague.

  The missus. That was a big word in the shed. It could mean someone you’d been married to for years, or someone you met last night, or someone you had your eye on.

  ‘Well, we’ve got Red Rock Gorge next,’ said Bertram Junior. ‘Out from the Hill. You wouldn’t believe the kitchen there. It’s more like a motel. They’ve even got a dishwasher, and they’ve got their own permanent staff cook, she’ll give you a hand. There’s even a swimming pool.’

  ‘So I’ve got the next job?’

  ‘Don’t rush it. Let me think about it. I’ll let you know some time.’

  No matter how hard they worked, it was always a good idea to get workers to push themselves that little bit harder.

  By about Thursday of the first week he was looking flushed and overstrained in the heat, trying to do everything right. Friday night at tea-time he entered the mess holding a stubby of Coopers, with a freshly-split six-pack in the fridge that Bertram Junior had noted, wondering who it belonged to. Bertram Junior pointed at him: ‘So that’s your secret, Cookie. You’re a pisspot.’

  He only laughed. Bertram Junior kept good-humoured about it, but it was not impressive — he switched to a frown — a cook swigging back the stuff while he got the tea ready. They started on Coopers, they moved on to port wine, and next thing you knew they were wearing sarongs and sitting on the back steps playing the guitar and smoking dope when they should have been active.

  He had set alight a lot of rubbish in a 44 — what did he think, the bush wouldn’t burn? Bertram Junior hadn’t noticed, but Maurie Holgate pointed to the smoke. When Bertram Junior mentioned the fire he said, ‘What about the fire under the water boiler? That’s lit every night.’

  ‘That’s not what’s concerning the grower.’

  ‘It’s the same thing, only safer. There isn’t a stick or a blade of grass within fifty metres of the huts.’

  Bertram Junior sighed. Couldn’t people understand that the aim was to keep the client happy? It was true what Davo said. There was no such person as a good cook.

  MELON GLUT

  The dented aluminium kettle of boiling water he carried over to the shed twice a day sloshed everywhere. Sandwiches came apart, fruit bruised, biscuits crumbled, cake squashed, the four-litre teapot lost its lid. He packed morning smoko into cardboard boxes on the tray of his truck, and was running late, always running late. Wheel-tracks crossed over like dinosaurs’ hip bones in the yards, and today the truck hit them hard.

  Only items intact: jar of International Roast instant coffee, tin of Milo, tin of sugar, clutch of teaspoons, a two-litre pack of Diploma UHT milk. Tea slops clogged the bottom of the rockmelon dish. Splotches of gritty wet were everywhere, like blots of rain from a dry storm. The waxed sides of the milk carton were smeared ochre. What was the point of it?

  He wiped things down with a Chux Superwipe, reshaped the sandwiches, rinsed the melon, regunned the motor, and went more carefully. He probed and surged across the remaining red sand of the half-kilometre route, leaving coils of dust around the meat house, through the doors of the twin-doored pit toilet, dust drifting ahead of him through stands of spindly, thin-leaved gidgee near the sheep yards. On the last hump he slowed to a crawl.

  He always seemed to be running late. But when he got there he was early.<
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  Dogs raced over to greet him, tails flicking, eyes shining. They knew who he was. They were after sandwich crusts, stray rounds of Fritz, pickings of cold mutton and maybe a dish of milk. If they were impatient, and grabbed too soon after smoko started, they’d get lofted away by a soft-shod boot stinking of sheep-grease.

  ‘Git away, yer hound!’

  In the sheep yards the owner’s sister yelled and flapped a feed bag at stubborn, panicky sheep refusing to enter the narrow race for branding — her hat jammed low over her ears, her shirt-tail flying. It was too hot for sheep to move, but humans were hard at it. The slightly built, dust-smudged, hard-working Fiona Holgate was always active somewhere. In their time off, the team sat in doorways watching her. There she’d go, tearing down sidetracks on a motorbike with a kelpie perched on the handlebars, or cantering past bareback on a pale horse, or glancing down at the fellas from the side window of her brother’s Cessna as it banked over the shearers’ quarters at first light, heading off to locate mobs for the next day’s shearing. At knock-off time she tipped sheep, angled their necks, and cut their throats for dogs’ meat. Most of the year she was an art student in Sydney. Now she financed herself by dabbing spots of paint on the backs of sheep in the race, branding the culls to indicate which would spend another year ambling around the paddocks of Leopardwood Downs ripping at shrubs and disdaining weeds, and which would go for slaughter, maybe ending their days on sand again, in Saudi Arabia, through the live sheep trade.

  Freshly shorn naked, the sheep were bewildered from being held hard against shearers’ knees in positions they’d never assumed in nature — legs flapping uselessly as if broken, eyes locked back in their heads — sheep confused from being tumbled down a chute into a pen of jittery brothers, a sudden transition from gloom to stark daylight. As he circled the yards he glanced at their gaunt white backs and piss-stained bellies. No raw gashes, no blood, no cuts. Early in the day, and the workers were taking it steady.

  He backed the truck up to the shed. Unpacked the smoko boxes.

  Wool bales were stacked across the mouth of the loading bay, two metres above ground level. The presser, Davo, seeing him coming, reached down to lift the boxes inside, placing them on the curved tops of bales. As fast as he could haul himself up after them Davo was back at the press, gathering armloads of wool from the bins, balancing them high, face almost hidden, then striding across the floor, tucking the bundles under the descending plate of the Stevlon woolpress. Power came from an 11 h.p. Honda petrol motor. Pounding as the pressure came on, it sent out exhaust fumes, multiplying the early heat. It had been forty degrees yesterday; it would be forty-four today. Centimetres away from having his arms torn off, Davo poked stray bunches of wool back in, and laughed as he watched the pressure plate bearing down. Any worries were off-beam. The plate disconnected with a sudden clunk, hissed up again, and the needle of the pressure gauge returned to zero. Newer-style presses had automatic sensors and in-built digital scales, but Davo didn’t hanker for one, not really, why should he, he’d never made a mistake, and it added a charge to the job — to have this constant challenge as he stuffed the last corners of the bale, pulled out the pins, and watched the wool puff back into the top; then rolled the bale to the platform-scales with a flick of a twin-pronged bale-hook, and assessed the weight.

  ‘Spot-on,’ he boasted.

  Still a few minutes to go before smoko. From deeper inside the shed came the steady metallic whirr of handpieces, the hectic competitive shouts as the shearers raced to their nine-thirty smoko break. The noisy pitch of the handpieces with their combs and cutters clattering rose to a percussive complexity, playing against the ear intricately, a steel chorus.

  He stepped over piles of fleece and bits of wool spilling from the wool bins. Made his way past the classing table to the end of the shearing board. Wedged himself into a gap in the wall struts, barely fitting.

  He came here to watch the work sometimes. He had a stated reason for this: cooking for workers was a case of restoking burnt-off energy. Who worked the most deserved the most. He’d heard that said. He’d heard a lot of things said. If there was a ration on certain luxuries — chilli and garlic sauce, say, which Bertram Junior seemed to think the cook had ordered, when he hadn’t — or some hard worker (shearer) was delayed for a meal and a slouch (rouseabout) tried to get his share or a second helping, then the cook ought to know. This was the fine-tuning end of the cook’s art, so it was said — standing by with a wooden spoon to belt the knuckles of slackers.

  But really he came here to watch people and see what was happening in their lives.

  Here where he stood, the two rousies, Pam and Louella, could usually squeeze past him — just. Today they were not even trying. They dragged their brooms around as if they were made of lead. Something was going on he didn’t understand. Usually they scooted along the board noisily wielding their brooms. (Instead of bristles the brooms had stiff scrapers of white plastic.) Usually they went in under the shearers’ feet, grabbing the wool as it dropped to the floor, anticipating every next blow. Right now they were moping. Fleece was piled in mounds like dirty laundry, getting in the way. Barbara appeared to be doing a rousie’s job as well her own classing work. She strode around the table skirting, flinging wool into the bin behind her in controlled accurate fistfuls. When Louella threw, she missed, and the wool slid down the wall. Then she leant on her broom listlessly, giving him a sad, shy smile from her lustrous Maori eyes. Oh, boy, Cookie, ef you only knew the trouble I was havin here you wouldn’t believe et.

  At the farthest end of the board Old Jake shore in bare feet, a pair of old jeans, no shirt. A red headband kept sweat from his eyes, and held his long grey hair in place. He was deaf, which emphasised his aura of isolated privilege. With sweat shining on his flat, honey-complexioned face, and with broad lips that hardly moved when he spoke, he looked like a Polynesian king in exile. Then he plucked another sheep from the holding pen and hauled it back to his stand, overtaking the younger shearers with long, clean, sweeping blows, creaming the belly wool to the floor and repositioning the sheep, then curling back the rest of the fleece in one smooth piece, making this demanding, difficult contortion look easy. Old Jake was sixty. Back in the shade near the shearers’ quarters his air-conditioned Landcruiser was loaded up with possessions — electric typewriter, tape player, video unit. He carried everything from shed to shed. He was a man whose every motion implied application to the task: which was to shear the maximum tally (climbing towards two hundred a day plus, even after a two-month lay-off in New Zealand), pocket his money without waste, ease his bones with a hot shower and a cold bottle of beer after work, eat well and on time, and get to bed early. When Old Jake arrived at Leopardwood Downs he handed over a loaf of sweet, compact Maori bread the size of a barrow wheel. It had been sewn into a flour bag, and brought from New Zealand on the plane. ‘I do like that bread of yours, Cookie,’ he nodded quietly.

  When the minute hand of the clock jumped to half-past nine the next shearer in line, Bertram Junior, dropped his handpiece, slipped out of his shearing harness and buckjumped his last wether down the chute without straightening his back. The rumble of the old diesel shearing engine died away. A fading scrabble of hoofs, then, as Bertram Junior eased himself upright, mopped his face with a scrap of towelling, reached up to a drum Esky, which hung by a nail on the fascia board above his stand, and drew a half-litre of ice-cold lemon cordial from the spigot into his tin cup. Bertram Junior rarely ate during the day. Instead, he sank litres of sweet fluid — lemon, lime, orange, tropical punch, orange-mango, raspberry — ate no lunch, and only piled his plate at the evening meal. He wanted to lose weight but couldn’t seem to at present, even in these sauna-like conditions. Sugary cordial was not the only reason. He loved boiled rice with milk, sugar, and cream. Hated sultanas, though. He ate bread and butter pudding with stolid patience, separating the sultanas from the custard, making a neat stack beside his plate.

  One day he asked Bertram
Junior if he liked figs. Bertram Junior gazed back and said, ‘What’s that?’ He knew strawberries, he said, apples, pears, Kiwi fruit, pineapples, oranges, you name it, but had never heard of a fig. ‘What’s a fug?’ He described figs in detail, down to their compressed purple-white inner fibres. But still drew a blank. ‘I don’t know em.’ Now, collecting his tally book, Bertram Junior ambled along the board, giving him a serene unsmiling look from his large, round eyes. ‘Nothin to do, Cookie?’ he taunted as he disappeared out the back to count each shearer’s tally for the run, and enter it in the book.

  While Barbara drove the reluctant rouseabouts on to finish clearing the board, he went round behind the press, where the wool was stored before being collected by the carrier. Each day’s smoko was taken here in a different spot, depending on spaces being filled up. Workers sat or lay on bales, tempting dogs with sandwich crusts, yarning, snoozing. Fiona Holgate came in unobtrusively, selected an apple, stretched back on a bale, munched, and pulled her hat down over her eyes. Maurie Holgate threw his hat in the corner, borrowed cigarette makings from Davo, and eyed the teacake.

  ‘What have we got today? Lemon icing?’

  Maurie Holgate was always on the look-out for what the cook produced. His regular smokos never came fresh from the oven, but year long were peeled from Gladwrap in desperate paddock corners. Every day, on Bertram Junior’s instructions, a cake was baked with Maurie in mind. Few others ate it in such heat. ‘Good PR,’ winked Bertram Junior. ‘Keeps the grower happy.’ Except it was noticeable the grower wasn’t happy. He and Bertram Junior were having words, heads together, points being made with solemn emphasis.

  ‘I think I’d better ring Alastair to get a fix on this,’ said the grower. ‘He thinks a bloke can live on promises.’

  ‘It’s bad, that’s all I know,’ said Bertram Junior, dropping his head, cautiously edging his eyes around, letting his gaze linger on one person after another, not giving any clues. The shed was another planet where another language was spoken, when it came to a cook trying to follow the life there.