A Sea-Chase Read online

  ‘You drink too much, Rooster Cogburn.’

  ‘I ain’t had a drink since breakfast.’

  Tony kept cockatoo while Warwick had it off with Judy against the tankstand.

  One day Judy learned from her father that he’d been working his guts out to send her to boarding school, to get her away from this. Working on the railways and keeping the farm going on his days off. So down she went to Meriden, at Strathfield, and another life, torn from Warwick overnight. For a term she lived in a silent scream and then gave up thinking about him and writing to him, it was just too hard.

  Judy wondered how to bring Harold Wells’s question about Dubbo into the conversation. A direct question about anything clammed Tony up. He gave angled stares and said nothing. You felt a sardonic thought ripple across his frontal cortex though. If you could not take that stare you really hated him. An auctioneer, it made for discretion. On radio it came out as timing.

  The next day at breakfast the cat jumped into Tony’s lap. He stroked her ears, the tips disappearing into his fists as he milked them. With the kitchen full of smoke from frying mutton chops Mum asked him if he had his eye on anyone.

  ‘In Dubbo?’ he said. ‘There’s too much competition.’

  ‘But you’re good with girls,’ said Mum as she banged utensils around. This statement was made despite Tony’s never having a girlfriend as such, unless Judy counted. Mum had seen Tony on the stage in Dubbo amateur dramatic’s Thirty-Nine Steps and in Leslie Sands’s Something to Hide – a battle-of-wits, murder-of-the-spouse mystery. Plays like it went on being performed in the country for far longer than you would think before being consigned to the waste-paper basket of culture. They weren’t off the subject either at Blindale even yet. Murder of spouse was not all that far removed on their river-bend oasis. A Schmidt was shot by his missus and not before time, coming out of their meat house, for example, just a couple of years back.

  The Watsons called it a holiday driving to Dubbo to see Tony on stage. He turned red when Mum, in the foyer, said how good he was peering through a glassless pane or playing a detective in a felt hat. Why wasn’t he ever the leading man though? When he kissed that large girl from the Commonwealth Bank the audience cheered. Judy saw him in the big one, All My Sons, and he was awful. The act he carried off to perfection was always going to be behind the mic or up on a platform in the saleyards. Amateur dramatics, Tony said, was a hotbed of married men, no holds barred, to single or married women with a yen for the boards and vice versa.

  ‘There’re teachers too,’ he said, looking at Judy.

  ‘I’m not a teacher anymore.’ She had decided, and told him. Bugger Ken’s charming and coaxing.

  ‘We could have guessed that,’ said Mum, whose scorn was based on Judy not sticking to things.

  ‘Not you, Mata Hari, I don’t mean you,’ said Tony. ‘Remember Callaghan, the maths teacher with the black eye at assembly? Remember that woman who came raving after him out of nowhere in front of us kids and the headmaster and staff, and started beating him bare-knuckled? Say no more. She was married. He was not. Teachers. All the professional classes, bar none. Ran tan tar-ra.’

  ‘Even doctors?’ said Judy.

  She was loading the car when he came over, took hold of a clean rag, and with a bucket of water cleaned her front, back and side windows of dirt and squashed grasshoppers. Pop filled the tank from a forty-four gallon drum with a hand pump and checked the tyres, ready for her getting on her way. Tony knelt and pulled roly-poly grass from the radiator. Judy filled the waterbag and hooked it dripping on the bumper bar. Next leg for her was the cross-country bash to Silver Springs, her childhood home where her father lived mostly while her mother researched at AGS. The Mini was falling to bits. She’d leave it with her father to fix up and catch the Bourke train back to Sydney.

  ‘Interesting you said doctors,’ said Tony, coming around to where Judy stood waiting to say goodbye. ‘Stumpy Vandervoord, he’s the tenor in South Pacific next up. Couldn’t stand the colour bar in South Africa so he’s come over here to tell us we’re just as bad and to “schtoomp” as many nurses as he can. Take your measuring tape to Hollywood. A lot of hot-shots are short-arses. He’s over Margaret Wells, your friend, the teacher. She’s made a pest of herself appearing at out patients’ asking for him.’

  ‘But they were dancing together on Friday night.’

  ‘There’s charm for you,’ said Tony. ‘By the way, how’s Wes?’

  ‘He’s great. I couldn’t be happier,’ said Judy.

  ‘Still on the love boat?’

  ‘It’s heaven.’

  And that was all Tony ever really pried into around anyone Judy ever went out with after Warwick Mickless. There was the gold standard, and then there was the rest.

  Judy sat in the postage stamp-sized shade of the Mini Minor, miles from Blindale, with miles to go towards Silver Springs. The engine was overheated. The radiator hissed blowing steam. While she waited for it to cool enough to refill, she perched on the folding stool Harold Wells had given her. The sun was almost overhead and she crouched away from it. An ant ran up the inside leg of her jeans. She climbed back in the car and watched ants from there. They struggled across the path of other ants dodging the ones who weren’t going the same way. Some scuttled, some hopped. There must have been five or six different lots of them, separate species, in a small circle of ground. She got out and poured water over her head from the waterbag. It dripped into the dirt and the ants went crazy. She had a thumping headache. It was what had made her pull off the road.

  Whenever Judy did anything like looking at ants a staring fit came over her and the threat of a migraine. Nobody please disturb her. She got into the passenger seat with a wet towel over her head. If she came back later, say turned around and drove back from Silver Springs to Blindale, would she be able to find the same lot of ants? Would she know it was them? There must be as many ants on a roadside as there were stars in the sky, and they all went around the same celestial sphere. Her headache had a concentrated, heavy pulsing centre. The earth as in dirt, earth as in rocks and dry distance, dragged her down.

  On the road again driving, a distant piece of broken glass or a shiny tin can – or was it a roadside reflector – dimmed and brightened. Slowing the car, Judy worked out where it was and stopped. A piece of glass, a shard from a broken side mirror of a towed away wreck, lay propped on a pebble. She took an old seed bag from the boot and walked along the side of the road, collecting broken bottles and metal cans, plastic bags and whatever else would never rot of its own accord, hauling the sack back to the car and stuffing it in the back. She took care not to cut herself.

  Her headachy, lumpy feeling dulled. It felt like the whole of her life. Out of that ache she wanted to escape into novelty like a splash of cold water. She longed to be back with Wes. The dinghy, the harbour, the sea would give her that splash. Washing up last night with Tony was something Judy felt, while doing it, that she always did. They had done their turns in the kitchen at the Marks’s, where there was a chalked roster of chores. Warwick shared the roster with her, grabbing a tea towel when he came in from the droving plant off the North Bourke road. They ground their hips against each other as they stacked away plates. They sneaked out into the dark. Up against the tankstand they went.

  Judy always had a feeling of Warwick at the back of her mind, of how they were then. She arranged it according to her moods. Whenever a soft, lingering, uncompleted feeling came over her she was back there. It had nothing to do with what she felt for Wes, except, if there was a raw, primitive mental image of love to be reached with Wes, then surpassed, it burned there.

  By now she had come to the straggle of houses that was the settlement against the railway tracks. She turned onto the main road and into the service station where she bought a Sydney Morning Herald, two days old. Then out off the main road again and east along the bare Silver Springs road till she came to the property entrance ramp. Arriving at Silver Springs had the feeling o
f everything happening when it did all the time, over and over. She had not been there for months. But wasn’t she always arriving and going away again in her feelings?

  It was a puzzle that Raymond Compton was a vegetable grower. There was no water and no good soil at the Springs. He did not need the money. He’d come into some, or rather Beth had for both of them, an inheritance from the Darkes after which they had joined the Australian Club. But Raymond was raised on a market garden in a part of southern Sydney swallowed by suburbs. His father was killed crossing a railway line in a sulky with boxes of lettuce. Old habits died hard when it came to providing potatoes and mashable peas, easy boiling for those without teeth, Popeye spinach for kids with rickets. Wheat grew in a couple of seasons when he first came out there. Wattles and other woody species were bulldozed aside to make green emerald squares fed by trace elements and superphosphate. It was not a paradise, but once or twice had looked like one.

  Only a bigger inspiration would get him off. He talked about an oyster farm, a crop that grew in water. On his 50,000 waste acres he shrank his activities back to the homestead block. A few bleating sheep were enough. They nosed through his olive trees like a flock in Biblical times. The distant blare of a diesel horn brought him up to date. The railways were where he had busted a gut to get Judy out of Bourke. Pounding a trike on the rails, wearing a hot black felt NSWGR-issue hat, he had handed out fettlers’ wages up and down the line. Beth told him he was ridiculous but money came in, allowing Beth to do her PhD, to go slack on her mothering. This was before their inheritance. On and off she lived at AGS, still did, getting famous, in the single women’s quarters. Around Silver Springs, the knowledge that Judy’s mother was the Dr Elizabeth Darke who worked at AGS and inspired field trips dictating their improvements was not something that everyone was aware of. People who knew Beth as a young bride did not always put Judy’s parents together when they talked about crop failures. They swore death to the bitch who bred their varieties at AGS. The events of Judy’s childhood, with their handings-over and movings-around, so big in her mind, were episodes in the building of two other lives, just a few brief months long, each of them as emergencies. When Judy recognised that her growing-up curve would be over. Her parents waited, cautious to intervene until she stopped being prickly.

  Raymond was a tall, slightly stooped man in his midfifties who wore overlarge sunglasses with flat sides, and a manner that did not fit in. He never said much for himself but listened in a way that made people feel he doubted what they said. Men out there did not wear straw hats the way Raymond did, wearing a coolie hat while driving a tractor. As a teenager Judy put his earning efforts into a category like the pattern of ants. Ants slaved. Ants endured.

  Silver Springs homestead was more a camp than a house. It was how Raymond liked it, nailed together sheets of tin, spindly corner posts, a flat tin roof. The floor was beaten earth. Cooking was done on an outside fireplace. Judy still called her father Daddy while her mother had become Beth. Greeting her, he took a cigarette from his mouth, dropped the butt on the ground and stamped it with his heel.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ he said, springing ahead of her, almost at a run.

  Around the back was a utility truck with carpentered shelves in a pyramid or A-frame structure. The racks were a display area where people could touch, examine and buy what he had grown when he stopped in front of their houses. There were not enough people locally so three times a week he made an early start for Bourke where he had built up a following. He showed Judy the bell he rang when he came into a street. There were not many streets and there was little money and people never ate greens much. He found beating bugs, grubs, birds, rats, rabbits and marsupials a battle. But he loved helping in some way people who could not help themselves. It was something else apart from fixing engines that he had in common with Wes, Judy mooned around thinking, loving the two men.

  That night Judy sliced the cold joint of mutton Mum Watson had given her to take for Raymond in an esky. She made a salad with the fresh, coarse lettuce he grew under a hessian shade. She did not say much, nor did he. It was all right when she had arrived but now, like a creeping tide, he annoyed her. He felt that annoyance. It boxed him in. She did not care.

  ‘When are you back teaching?’ he asked.

  That question again! she thought. ‘Another three weeks.’ It was a lie. She was done. First chance she had she would go into Head Office and resign, without Ken Redlynch given an opening to say a word.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said, holding up a gnarled vegetable that resembled a big tooth. ‘Can it go in a salad?’ She threw it out the window. There was no glass in the window so it was easy. You just pushed past a loose canvas flap and flung whatever was in your hand out into the night.

  Why was she so cranky? She did not know, but she certainly was. She believed her parents had started plotting to marry her off to Wes. It would be the next version of palming her off on the Salvos. She loved Wes. But it was not in their power to do what she wanted to do for herself.

  Anything mechanical or technical interested Raymond. His yards were scattered with tractors, wrecked cars, old Morrises, Austins and Leylands, whose engines were of interest, for some reason, and pump engines people had given up on.

  ‘Did Ken get the butterfly nut problem sorted out?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Judy.

  ‘He told me about it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The schools, are they going for it?’

  ‘No, Daddy.’

  ‘It’s the Achilles heel, that nut. Could you tell Ken I’ve been thinking about it?’

  ‘When I see him.’

  Questions were tedious when the person asking them had no great expectations of themselves and loaded them onto the person they were talking to, who they had expectations about. It was the definition of parents, Judy supposed. Bundle it all up under the heading of totally unnecessary concentration on their one child. They called it worry. God, she wished she was back with Wes.

  Thinking of Wes, Judy felt herself going quiet, somewhat meek. She tucked her legs up, getting settled on the old couch. The Tilley lamp hissed hypnotically; it was a bow wave cleaving past, and the couch was the low cockpit of a comfortable old sailing boat.

  ‘Does Mummy have a date yet for Maryland?’ She still could not bring herself to call her mother Beth in front of her father.

  ‘Well, yes she does,’ Raymond said as he lifted the lid of the teapot to see how much was left. He tamped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘Next February.’

  ‘Do you feel let down?’

  ‘Of course not. What a question. Let down how? I know I can’t leave the Springs.’

  ‘Well you can surely. Has she wondered if you might like to go with her?’

  ‘She has, actually. But there’s quite a lot happening here.’ By that he meant nature writ small was a universe of interest – bush rats’ nests, plovers’ eggs, marauding foxes and dingoes and stray wild dogs, wedge-tailed eagles building nests of sticks in dead trees and so on. Add in motors not yet fixed and the possibility of wheat growing in sand in minimal moisture. That was a try at something he was not over trying in a small plot. Beth had several experiments going that he ran. Then there was his veggie run.

  Whenever Judy wrote to her father she gave a kind of made-up version of her life. Her letters were jaunty and cheerful and cheeky, and if they weren’t full of lies she left a lot out. Writing to her mother made demands.

  Her mother made her proud. To her mother she told the truth. She understood cell biochemistry, or enough to get by, with thanks to her mother’s letters alone. She knew enough to declare that under all explanations was a mystery that a theory would go a long way towards bringing out.

  A Darke family question going back in time was how the young Beth Darke had ever thought Raymond Compton’s Silver Springs was a paradise. She told Judy how it was when she fell in love with Raymond. ‘The heart mustn’t reason,’ she said. The heart
was anathema to the intellectual, oddly religiously minded Darkes. They were a type found on Sydney’s North Shore – capable, brainy, reasoned and rich and churchgoing. Beth had not thought Silver Springs a paradise past when she came to see it for the first time and tried living there. She had lived there when Judy was a little girl because before she got on the train for her first visit she found she was pregnant. There was a lot about the Darkes to get away from, said Beth, if you wanted to be yourself.

  When Judy went teaching she had written to her mother, admitting the mistake she had made all because a bunch of friends from boarding school always did everything together. They were not even her friends all that much anymore. She could hear her mother’s brain ticking over while she scribbled her replies. Out with this, out with that. Beth never went off on a tangent in her replies. She expected, when Ken took Judy in, that Judy was interested politically in something along Ken’s lines and maybe a push towards science. She never dreamed it was something like a breath of wind on a section of taut canvas.

  It came to Judy from nowhere, into the hot, square Silver Springs hut that night, lit by a hissing Tilley lamp and clicking with night insects, that she was ashamed of Ken’s machines.

  She was ashamed that the Ken she admired and revered, who she loved, really, could ever have imagined that the contraptions worked and would be taken on. He shamed her by making her obliged to help him. She shamed herself by helping him. He fought a rearguard battle with the machines like the one in his politics. Bookkeepers and record keepers used computerised filing and calculation shortcuts, and scientists took them for granted. Her mother compiled statistical records on a VAX computer. At the Australian Club dinner Ken had banged on to her against them. See how the Mark II International Educator covered key points of any subject, he said, rote learning parcelled out via a talking encyclopedia function. Put up a slide. A great branching tree. Microscopy transparencies going down to the roots of living matter. Go deeper. Change slides, answer a question, read it onto the tape. Listen back on matching tape coded to study guide. Go to the edge of what was feasible in a definition of life with a series of audio-visual publications, cassette tapes, boxes of transparencies. Leap past school classroom to adult ed. ‘We become ourselves by exceeding what we are given. We make the revolution with the weapons we shape.’ Leap off from there into subjects Ken knew absolutely nothing about but had opinions on.