Shearers' Motel Read online

  Sharon would certainly hear the phone if she was there. There was an outside bell. An electrically mounted arm with a lead ball at the end of a spring struck a dish-shaped iron ringer on the back verandah wall. It was deafening. The neighbours three kilometres away heard it when the air was still. Sharon never missed it. She’d fly from the saddle and come crashing in.

  Like now.

  ‘I knew it would be you. Hang on. Let me get my breath. We got your letter, what an amazing life, isn’t it chaotic? All that stuff about restaurants, are you serious? Wait a second.’

  He heard the phone being put down, a cigarette being shaken out of a packet — heard the click of Sharon’s lighter and the rapid intake of smoke as she gathered her thoughts. He imagined the way she touched the corner of her mouth with her thumbnail when she took the cigarette out again, and then the way she ran the flat of her hand down the seam of her jeans as she positioned herself on the edge of the kitchen table, crossed her legs, looked pensive, calmer, more serious, less surface-sociable. ‘How are you?’ Tossing her hair back from her face. Focusing on something outside, the poplars turning yellow through the kitchen window. ‘It’s starting to get cold here,’ she said. ‘What’s it like there?’

  ‘Scorching.’

  She gave news of the children. Marie’s good marks in year ten but her deep unhappiness at the Central school. Ella’s role in the year eight play: how serious she was, how lovely she looked in the costume that Marie, over a week of late nights, had designed, cut, and sewn for her. Then her own success at the Goulburn sales, where she got top price for a line of lambs, had he heard?

  ‘Have I heard? Way up here?’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean.’

  This was a habit of Sharon’s, a verbal tic. Had people heard what they couldn’t possibly have heard under any circumstances? He knew that. But automatically he responded, ‘How could I have heard?’ — sounding testy when they were just renewing contact, distantly conscious but with the uncomfortable awareness growing that what this was about between them, whatever it was, wasn’t going away, couldn’t be covered by enthusiastic descriptive letters, weekly phone calls, overexplained absences, or by easy promises — which he now made — to be home by a certain date, Irene’s fifth birthday party. ‘At the very latest,’ he stressed, which would mean so much to her, he knew that, they both did — it was something they could agree on and talk about fondly for a while.

  ‘Well, anyway, Sharon, there’s the twelve-minute beep. I’d better be getting back to the shed or I’ll be skinned alive.’

  Driving his yellow truck back to the quarters through the blond grass and past the stands of fragile leopardwoods he felt depressed. A plunging, stinging helplessness. People who were chance encounters to him drew feeling from him, while those who loved him weren’t getting what he had.

  It was peaceful in the quarters with the shearers over at the shed. Work time snared him again. He leaned back on the kitchen sink, and kept falling asleep for instants of buzzy time. Every sound was clear and identifiable. Movement of wind, thump of heat-expanding tin, scrape of bird claws on the roof: you could dream the day through with those companionable, familiar, lulling noises, as long as you didn’t have an inner clock pressing the back of your brain.

  Today someone had left their radio going. Odd, he hadn’t heard it earlier. He heard a time call. Then Slim Dusty. Anne Murray. Archie Roach. Willie Nelson.

  Mentally he ran through the list for lunch: a roast shoulder, which he’d tear and hack into rib-portions, and serve with fresh rolls; plates of salad items — thawed lettuce, squashy red tomatoes, tinned beetroot, sweaty cheese, Fritz, sliced cucumber, pineapple rings.

  There came the distinct sound of footsteps on the western side of the building. He looked out the door. Strange. Just the usual sight along there — a row of wireframed beds on the dirt, and Bertram Junior’s Charger parked strategically, so the stereo could be heard from a reclining position, under the stars. Then on the other side of the shed he saw a pair of legs disappearing into the laundry. He went over. It was Louella, bent over the tubs, disconsolately heaving greasy shearers’ denims up and down.

  ‘They sent me over to do their washin.’

  ‘Why’d they do that?’

  She didn’t answer. Just plunged into the washing again. Shearing denims were like no other kind of laundry, filthy with wool grease and dust, pizzle-smear and shit stain.

  He walked back to the kitchen. He didn’t have a clue. It was the last half-hour to dinner (as lunch was called). Simplicity of the table — shiny green surface awaiting placement of bread board, lifting tongs, enamel dishes, tins of food with their tops removed, spoons at the ready. Something Alastair had told him that he was thrashing himself to achieve: ‘You’ve got to have boiling water in your sink, and everything you do, you wash up as you go. You dirty a pot, you wash a pot. As the people are bringing in and emptying their plates, you’re not sitting down talking to them, you’re washing the plates up. It’s just one of those things, you’ve just got to plan your day, and you’ve got to plan your next day, what you’re going to cook. And really you can see cooks chasing their tail, purely because they’re not organised. But if they organise themselves it’s absolutely magnificent what they sometimes can do.’

  Alastair had told him that a cook could control a team if he was a smart cook and a good cook. ‘His existence is lonely, but he’s one bloke who’s not a member of the team in general, and people will talk to him in confidence.’

  He felt about as effective as an ant. But as a touch of pride, had established a habit of laying the serving plates on sheets of newspaper. Today’s tablecloth was made up of the executive employment pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. The meat was cooling under a flyproof cover. He couldn’t put the salad out till just before noon because of the heat. The food was only just tepid in the fridges anyway (even fridge number three, crammed with lettuce and cauliflower, where everything had frozen at first, was running hot as candleflame). Heatwave conditions like this and there wouldn’t be much eating done. He could tell that now.

  He congratulated himself on judging quantities to the minimum. He didn’t just want to be known as a good cook, he wanted to be a cheap cook. The heat was on his side. It was cooking for appearances.

  Jugs of cordial crammed with ice were plonked on the mess table. A lot of thought had gone into selecting the colour combination — lemon at one end, lime at the other. The ammoniated odour of Spray’N’Wipe over everything was like a nudge in the ribs — this cook was clean. He started to think about the next shed. He saw his truck moving south, into a cooler landscape, coming under the shadow of a raincloud on a sealed road. He saw steam rising from bitumen, and he lay back with his mouth open, his eyes closed.

  Minutes away from twelve and the table arrangement was a symmetry of tinplate. Only one last thing needed — a chilled tin of beetroot. So out to the fridge to get it.

  Louella was sitting at the table, legs straddling the bench seat, lighting up a Marlboro, tears in her eyes. He hadn’t heard anyone come in.

  ‘I jes don’t believe it.’

  She turned her cigarette packet over and over on the bench seat between her fingertips. Her tears were huge, dark silver. Her crying came with a jagged breath that originated somewhere deeper than her lungs, a big physical heave, a convulsion.

  ‘They went n sacked me.’

  This was the same Louella who had been taunting Barbara from under stubborn brows only an hour ago, as she clutched her broom and trudged around the board and by every gesture and curl of her lip implied eat shit.

  ‘Has it ever happened before?’

  ‘Never in me whole life.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘They’ll drive me t’Bourke, I s’pose. I’m broke,’ her big brown eyes lifted to meet his. No one would be leaving the shed till the weekend. That was three days off. ‘Then I’ll catch the bus back to the Hill. Harold will find another shed for me. He’s a goo
d one, Harold. Yeah, Harold’ll look after me. He don’t take no shit.’

  ‘Will you have to pay a mess-bill for the days you don’t work?’

  Louella shrugged. ‘Depends.’

  ‘Can you cook?’

  ‘A bit,’ she brightened.

  ‘Well, come on, give me a hand in the kitchen. You can be my assistant.’

  Louella wiped a tear away with the sleeve of her shirt. ‘Whatcha want done?’

  He gave her a tin of beetroot, and told her to empty it into a dish. She wound the lid off, upended 750 grams from a height of half a metre. ‘Oops!’ as half of it splashed to the tabletop, the rest slithering to the floor. ‘I guess I ain’t much of a cook,’ as she cleaned up the mess. He took over with a Chux.

  ‘Come back after lunch. I’ll put you to work with a broom.’

  ‘I can use a broom, for sure.’

  ‘I’ll sling you a few bucks.’

  ‘You don’t have ta,’ she smiled. ‘Just call it quits on them batteries you gave me.’

  The shearers arrived, filling the room with heavy silence punctuated only by ‘What’s this, mate?’ … ‘Some of that, thanks.’ Bertram Junior came in, unusual for him. He said from the corner of his mouth, ‘Me and Louella and Willie-boy won’t be in for tea’.

  With the others milling around he expected Louella to disappear back to her room, to hide her face in shame, in anger. Then he saw that he knew nothing about sackings and hirings in the sheds, or about necessity and lack of choice in this life. You made your stand, you felt the emotion. But you couldn’t make it the end of the world. You couldn’t afford to. Louella sat at the table, smoking, drinking cordial, picking at a cold beetroot hamburger she’d slung together, and gossiping in a listless fashion with the others the way people always did at the lunchtime mess table, when they were stunned by the day’s noise, motion, action, and only wanted to stay still because of the ringing in their ears. They stared at the walls. They lapped cordial. They almost panted in short breaths, it was so hot.

  The afternoon wore on. Tiredness hit like metal poisoning. Cleaning up after lunch, he stepped clear of Louella’s broom as she went slowly, dreamily into corners and crevices, getting out dust that had accumulated for years.

  After a while he asked her: ‘Do you like working in the sheds?’

  Louella leant on her broom. ‘I hate em,’ dragging the words out as if each one was chained to a concrete block. ‘I-really-and-truly-hate-em.’

  ‘What would you rather do?’

  Louella looked into the distance for a minute. ‘The thing is, when I’m away from the sheds, I miss em?’

  She rested the broom on the wall. Wandered away.

  A while past afternoon smoko Willie-boy came into the kitchen with steely purposefulness. ‘Where’s Louella? We’re taking her to Bourke.’ He found Louella in her room, ‘Get packed, Lou.’ He sat at the wheel of Bertram Junior’s car, impatiently tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, radio going full blast, while Louella trudged back and forth, slinging her bags into the back. ‘Jesus, hurry up, will you?’ Then she got into the back seat at last, and Willie-boy turned the key. The motor wouldn’t start. Swearing between his teeth he marched over to the shed and back, fetching jumper leads, while Louella stayed where she was, focused on the horizon.

  At last Willie-boy and Bertram Junior roared off in a dust cloud, with Louella, plaything of the gods, on the back seat of the car unhappily clutching her luggage. In Bourke they left her ‘outside the worst Abo pub in town’ and went hunting for a replacement. He had a vision of the girl moving from one town to the next, set adrift, abandoned in the life.

  ‘She’s on her own now, Cookie. Fuck her.’

  BLAME THE STARS

  ‘The only trouble about Red Rock Gorge, Cookie, is that every man and his dog wants to shear there, because of it being luxurious. That swimming pool is a major drawcard. I worry that my brother has taken the job away from me while we’ve been up here with our various troubles. He’s got his own permanent cook, worst luck for you, eh.’

  Bertram Junior met his eye with his watery brown gaze, and shook his head in a kind of sorrow.

  ‘But won’t you need a cook at your next shed, even if it’s not Red Rock Gorge?’

  ‘That remains to be seen. See, Cookie, we might be going down to Hay.’

  ‘Hay?’

  ‘There’s a place coming up that another contractor reneged on. Alastair’s trying to get it. An eight-stander.’ Bertram Junior brightened at the thought. ‘Get that one, Cookie, and you’d be on contract, working your arse off but I reckon you could handle it, and the money would be unreal. You’d have your thousand a week, or close to.’

  ‘Well, give it to me, then.’

  ‘Hmm. I am thinking of your missus. Is Hay close to your home?’

  ‘A lot closer than this.’

  ‘Trouble is, they’ve got too many cooks down there that work local,’ said Bertram Junior with a feeling intonation, as if this was something he had only just realised, and passionately wished it were otherwise.

  It was the first time Hay had been mentioned as a possibility. He wondered how long Bertram Junior had known about it. Maybe the whole time here at Leopardwood Downs and from before. The shearers’ motel idea was nothing more than the next shed, better than the last one. Cold beer at smoko and cooks for the cooks, air-conditioned rooms and inner-spring mattresses, chlorinated water, a video library of wrestling classics and Terminator movies, a pool table, a basketball hoop, and steak instead of mutton all the time. ‘Maybe you could do us a poolside barbecue in the Weber cooker they’ve got there, then another night to give you a break we could lay down a hangi — how about that?’

  ‘I’d like to see a hangi some time,’ he admitted.

  ‘Let’s make it definite, then,’ nodded Bertram Junior before going downbeat again. ‘Only trouble is, for a hangi, the rocks out that way ain’t the right type. They crack up in the heat. You’re better off using railway ties or an engine block. The thing is there, that Red Rock Gorge’s got no rubbish lying around, on account of it’s a government operation — they’ve got plenty of labour. Just wait till we get down to Lilypad Station, though.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘In Victoria.’

  ‘We’re going there?’

  ‘It’s one of Alastair’s sheds. They’ve got volcanic rocks almost as good as back home. They shear in October.’

  ‘It’s only February now.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ said Bertram Junior after a long pause. ‘You’re getting the picture of how this operates, Cookie,’ he added in a kind of bitterly honest outburst.

  He thought that weaving phantoms in the air might have been a technique Bertram Junior had picked up from Clean Team Alastair in order to keep workers on strength till the end of a shed. He had heard a lot about contracting from Davo. ‘You’ve got to be able to tell the greatest whoppers ever. Alastair would nearly be the champion liar. He says, “There’s this shed out here and it’s all lambs and ewes”. He gets all these shearers and they go out and there’s these great wethers. He might have a couple of teams going at one time, and with the great shortage of shearers he’ll come up and promise five shearers in one place and six shearers in another place and he might send two out to each place. “These other fellows are coming, they mightn’t get there till morning.” But they are never coming.

  ‘When I did it for a while, gawd,’ admitted Davo, ‘I lied my head off — had to — and just hoped all the bullshit I spouted matched up when the shed started.’

  One day Davo said: ‘In relation to contracting and guys like Bertram Junior, bullshit matches their Maori thing.’

  ‘What Maori thing?’

  ‘The bullshitting propensity. Lying is one of their big things, you know, if you’re a good liar then it’s kudos. Like Bertram Junior staying up all night to do the paperwork. Like the way he said you were slacking off all the time. And the fact that you’re an alcoholic, a
nd your marriage is bust, and you haven’t got a farm at all.’

  ‘I haven’t?’

  ‘He’d like to see it. Then there’s the way he gets a rise out of you every time he mentions waiting outside the high school for your daughters. He was watching you when they slung Louella in the car and shot her into Bourke.’

  ‘That was pretty bad. Willie-boy went right off the map.’

  Davo shrugged. ‘Not as bad as it looked.’

  ‘She’s only seventeen, for Chrissakes.’

  ‘She’s from a hard place. The babies over there get hung in baskets over the wool table while the mothers work. They’re into rousing from a young age. It’s that or school, and the rest follows. It all happens at the deep end. Why do you think they come over to Australia? It’s not too hot in Kiwi. Anyway, they stick together. That’s their thing too.’

  ‘Bertram Junior said he wasn’t ever going to employ Louella again, and he said Harold felt the same way. Then they just dumped her outside the Post Office Hotel.’

  ‘She’d have friends there, for sure. You watch. She’s family. They’ll look out for Lou by remote control. I don’t feel too sorry for her after the way she stuck it up Barb. Arrgh, yeah, I suppose I do — I mean, I understand why she’s like she is, anyway. The next shed you work at I’ll bet she’ll be there, coming into the kitchen past mealtime as usual and giving you that big beautiful smile you’re a sucker for. This is the Kiwi work machine, mate — a subsection of the Australian shearing industry. Parts of the machine that don’t function get replaced. That’s a fact. If they repair themselves they get tried again. Third chances come harder. It might happen to anyone. It’ll happen to you one day.’

  ‘What will?’

  ‘You’ll get sacked.’

  Davo took a drag on his roll-your-own, narrowed his gaze and looked at him appraisingly, as if when it came to the crunch he could just as easily be the one doing the sacking, no worries.