Shearers' Motel Page 9

  It was no good slowing down and falling back, because then Bertram Junior slowed too. He saw Bertram Junior’s hand adjusting the rear-view mirror, trying to see if anything was wrong. Then with a spurt of dust the front vehicle would be on its way again, indicating Bertram Junior wasn’t going to be overtaken, and why didn’t people remember they had arrangements?

  Most of the time it was as if Bertram Junior drove with only half his attention on the accelerator; as if he drove in response to something played on the tape deck, a disco rhythm, maybe, creating an oscillation, a thrust, a mesmerised nod and a sudden wrench of the steering wheel. ‘Teardrops’, it might have been. That was Bertram Junior’s favourite at the time. ‘Turn that up,’ he would call from the mess-room whenever it came on the kitchen radio at Leopardwood Downs.

  He still didn’t know if he was going to be the cook at the next shed, and the only way to find out finally was to stick to Bertram Junior like flypaper until he either shook his head or nodded after making a phone call along the way. He still didn’t know if the next shed was going to be the Arid Zone Experimental Station at Red Rock Gorge or if it was going to be anywhere. He didn’t know if anyone else knew where it was going to be either. He thought now that even Alastair at Clean Team headquarters didn’t know. Cooks were playthings. That’s what the stories about them showed.

  ‘He says, “Pack your fucking bags and get out”, and Johnny packs his gear and he’s just about to leave. He says, “You better come back”. This goes on time and time again. He fell through the roof once. They sent him up to get something and he fell right through.’

  That was the pattern.

  Rattling around in the back of his truck were the carry-over shearing supplies: several kilos of onions nesting in a net bag of papery skins, greening potatoes, white rice, rumpled cartons of UHT milk, bakers’ flour, and half a sheep compressed into the Esky — a leg, a shoulder, and all the chops. In a cardboard carton were dusty bottles of black sauce, ruptured cellophane packs of mixed herbs, paprika, tomato sauce, and a bottle of parisian essence, which he had found useful in turning gravies from grey unappetising gruels into rich dark substances attracting mopping up with home-made bread. ‘If we don’t get you a shed, then all that stuff’s yours to take home with you,’ PR’d Bertram Junior. ‘Your bonus for doing a good job.’ He raised an eyebrow, pursed his lips. ‘Your missus will appreciate it for sure. Specially that outback mutton, it’s a treat.’

  At an isolated telephone exchange operating from the verandah of a fibro cottage at the edge of a paddock of shining clay, Bertram Junior said: ‘It looks like we’re going to have to let you go, Cookie. That brother of mine has put a team into Red Rock Gorge already. It’s always the way. It makes me so angry. He takes my best dogs, my best sheds, my best workers. At least he ain’t taken my best cook, eh.’

  ‘I like you, Bertram Junior. You’ve got charisma.’

  Outside the post office in Bourke, Bertram Junior came over with a grin: ‘Hang on in there, Cookie. They might want you in Hay after all.’

  He held the wheel lightly, watching stars drift across the windscreen and feeling warm night air fan his face. The rains had been down this way. The earth smelled damp and easy. All the long drive down sealed roads to the Clean Team headquarters, a town of glittering lights, where they arrived long after dark, it seemed to him that the work would be there when they took a dogleg turn down south, and travelled on more sealed roads through rained-on country into the Riverina.

  He pitched his tent beside a willow tree in the municipal caravan park. He took a change of clothes down to the ablution block and showered. Luxuriating with a bar of Pears’ soap, he worked on the pervasive filth of weeks. Soft town water did what hard bore water never could. He shampooed, rinsed, and shampooed again, picking what seemed like pebble-sized pieces of grit from his scalp. He felt drunk with the benefit of it all. Pulling on clean trousers, buttoning a stiff, sun-dried shirt, he saw how the flat, bright fluorescent light peered into every clean corner and gleamed back from each shiny surface.

  He unloaded his plastic cook’s chair, and put it on the grass next to his tent. He smeared on Rid and drank a stubby, stretching his legs out, knowing there was nothing to do after this except what he wanted to do.

  He went over to the phone booth that stood in a puddle of light beside the gravelled drive, and rang home. He would be back there late afternoon the next day. He had Irene’s birthday present in his pocket — a news-agency toy from Nevertire. There was confusion in Sharon’s voice when he said there might be another job to go to almost immediately, that he would know about it by the time he reached home. Not Red Rock Gorge but in the Riverina. He kept talking as if anything he decided was okay by her — steamrollering his way to the next shed with home just a place to touch in passing.

  Then he got back in his truck and drove to a different part of town, to the motel strip on the eastern, highway side, where he called into a bottle shop, bought his cook’s shout, and drove around the corner to a rendezvous.

  Everyone was in the pool at the Golden Horseshoe Motel when he came walking in with a carton of VB stubbies under his arm. Bertram Junior hauled out of the water with the news. ‘It seems like they’ve had all the rain they need round Hay and it’s rooted the shearing,’ he said dolefully. ‘Alastair wants us to shear suburban out of here for a while, and you know what that means, don’t you, Cookie.’

  He nodded. ‘Cut lunches. No cooks.’

  ‘Fraid so.’

  ‘Where will you guys live?’

  ‘That’s the good thing,’ Bertram Junior’s eyes shone. ‘Here in the motel.’

  Leaning on the pool fence, he watched people he knew rippling through the low-lit greenish-blue water, wallowing in the warm evening air, backstroking, belly-flopping, Lenny slicking like an eel, Rosie spinning like a corkscrew, Flash doing butterfly, Willie-boy floating, holding a drink in one hand and paddling softly with the other. Stars flicked from water to sky as the shearers forgot who they were.

  ‘Ain’t this the life, Cookie?’

  ‘Seems like it is.’

  ‘Come on in, then, ya bastard. It’s be-yootiful.’

  The figures in the pool seemed remote and privileged to him, like figures in a dream. He couldn’t connect to them the way he had before, even so recently as a few hours ago, back up the track to Leopardwood Downs. An understanding between them had been cut. Now they were part of a pattern that wasn’t his. They came back into this pattern all the time but he didn’t. He couldn’t affect them with his labour any more. He felt dislodged from the dream — cast out. He was hurt that Bertram Junior and his brother hadn’t found him another shed, even though he knew that was stupid of him. He kept looking over his shoulder for Alastair, hoping for a scrap of paper with a roughly drawn map, a telephone number, a new start. But it wasn’t Alastair’s fault either.

  ‘Alastair’s up at the Bowls Club,’ said Bertram Junior, ‘playing night comp. The boys left the car for him there. You don’t interrupt him at the club, though I think Davo’s planning to if he gets into town in time. He’s got a few points to make, bloody Davo.’

  He split the carton, setting it up on a poolside table. ‘Hoe in.’ He passed a bottle of Diet Fanta to Bertram Junior. ‘It’s on me. To my first overseer.’ He took a beer for himself. ‘Cheers,’ he raised the stubby. But felt depressed, thinking his own thoughts while the rest of them laughed and roared, giggled and gave chase, bombed and sprawled.

  He thought he wasn’t getting what he wanted, and would get what he wanted only if he was really game — if he risked enough. There was a stubbornness in him, he decided, a resistance, a deeper alienation than anyone knew. He drew back from immersing himself in the life while stating he wanted it; he could never fall on the blade; he wasn’t broken enough to match the imagery of ruination he carried inside. He had let it go. He must have — otherwise he would just camp in the caravan park until another job came up instead of going home in the morning.

/>   ‘A motel room’s expensive, isn’t it?’ he turned to Bertram Junior.

  ‘Oh, no, not if you divide it six ways.’

  He did a quick headcount. ‘Six?’ There were only five. Bertram Junior nodded towards a thatched poolside shelter. Someone was in there. He walked over. It was Louella. She was sitting in the shadows drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream straight from the bottle. She was wearing a pale blue one-piece swimsuit, her hair tied back in a chignon. She wore a crimson bougainvillea flower at the side of her head. She moved her face into the light: and the slow, hypnotised way she did it told him how she had got there from Bourke. It hadn’t been by bus or by hitching, or by getting lifts from shed to shed with friends and acquaintances, or by being collected and given rides by stock agents or wool brokers associated with Clean Team Alastair. It had been by working a feeling. That was all. That was everything. Louella had materialised into the life following a pattern that had nothing to do with the hard, head-breaking rules of daytime in the sheds. It was a pattern she could connect with it whenever she chose, settling in with utter languorousness. Maybe she wouldn’t be given work for a while, but she had a place. Somewhere to eat and somewhere to sleep. It was there for her whenever she tipped back her head and slippery-slided in from the outer. Here it was, a version of paradise: a motel, another shed, all these lights, the guys, and her best friend Rosie.

  She gave him a slow, lovely smile as she lit a cigarette, took it from her lips, and blew out the match.

  ‘Ay, Cookie, how are ya. Never thought I’d see you down thes way. They got a shed for you? They haven’t yet? Thet’s too sad.’

  AVAILABLE FOR WORK

  His truck came squeaking and rattling across the soft hills, through the pale blue haze of the home district sky, down past the poplars, across the creek, and up to the silver-roofed farmhouse under the old ribbon gums.

  The truck seemed to get its second wind there. It wouldn’t sink to the earth just now, it seemed. It went once around the turning circle near the walnut trees, gave a final choking roar of cylinders, and came to a halt facing the way out, down towards the dip of the track over the creek, aligning with the dirt road over the green hills again.

  The house was forty years old, and he had lived there for ten years, but he felt as if he had never seen it before. It looked newly made after the desolation of Leopardwood Downs. The roof-iron was bright silver and the guttering was choked with golden poplar leaves. The people who lived here were strangers. A doll’s pram lay overturned on the path. A billowing wash filled the clothesline. He leaned on the horn to announce himself.

  The dogs came pelting out, the whippet and the German coulie yapping around the truck where hordes of station dogs and shearers’ dogs had cocked a leg, getting themselves excited.

  He climbed from the truck and flung the dogs off with a yell. ‘Anyone home?’

  No answer. Nobody anywhere. A stab of disappointment that everyone wasn’t all over him like a rash. Windows open to the breeze. A flap of plastic scraping the exposed timbers of the loft space. A cement mixer from Elbo’s Hire down at the garden wall, where piles of granite boulders and a sledgehammer made a still life of Sharon’s morning. Up on the bare ridge he saw her Nissan. She would have been following him all the way on the road in, without either of them realising it — or just without him realising it. The Nissan jerked closer and he could hear the grind of the diesel engine, see Marie and Ella sitting dangerously on the roof-rack waving coloured sweaters and calling out as the vehicle dipped and disappeared into the creek-crossing. He wanted to be found sitting nonchalantly on the verandah, his nose in a book, a dog dreaming at his feet as if he’d never been away anywhere. Looking up — ‘Where have you all been?’

  They said he stank of mutton fat.

  ‘Like a greasy chop.’

  ‘A cigarette butt.’

  ‘A stale beer can.’

  ‘A warm roast.’

  ‘I want my present,’ demanded Irene. He reached into his pocket and produced a sun-bleached plastic news-agents’ doll about as big as his thumb, with a key ring through its topknot and a whistle-hole between its two pink ballerina’s feet.

  ‘Wow!’

  Marie and Ella stared at him while he told them about girls barely older than they were working in the sheds. Blotting it out with Bailey’s. Missing meals. Disputes settled with fists. Snores through the walls. About Louella dragged down the track by the hair, so to speak. The tangle of limbs in the kitchen, murmurous parties in the mess-room after lights out, a mist of dope spreading into the night air.

  ‘We couldn’t stand it.’

  But Sharon could — her eyes shone during the narration — she could stand anything, go anywhere as long as the feeling was right. But when he said he had wanted them to pack up and come and join him by about the middle of the second week, when he was depressed and homesick, she laughed disbelievingly. ‘Do you think we would have just piled into the car, dropped whatever we were doing and just come?’ The thing was she loved his company, but hated being put into his myth and written off that way.

  He said he couldn’t understand that.

  They walked around the garden. While he was away it had been scorched in a heatwave, then battered flat in freak flood rain thundering in from Alice Springs, leaving deep gouges in the track leading up to the house, drowned sheep, scoured pastures. Sharon’s rescue operations had been heroic. They talked across each other, delivering bits of news, eluding the moment when both might strike on the same feeling.

  ‘Has anyone phoned?’ he asked. ‘That guy Alastair? Harold? Bertram Junior? Anyone else?’

  ‘No. We saw shearers being lifted out by helicopter on the news. We wondered if one of them was you. Then you rang from Dubbo.’

  ‘All this rain means no work,’ he said.

  He pulled a bunch of creased cheques from his wallet. Bertram Junior had signed them on the benchtop at the Golden Horseshoe Motel. The money seemed like very little for the time and effort expended. He was embarrassed, humiliated, to realise that the work that had been intended, as he kept saying, to help family finances, had resulted in just one thousand one hundred dollars for an unstinting effort.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel bad,’ said Sharon defiantly. She wasn’t just someone who waited at home needing money, either. He needn’t have brought back anything.

  He took his garbage bags of dirty clothes and put them to soak in eucalyptus woolmix to get the smell out of them. He scrubbed himself in a hot shower. He came out reeking of Cusson’s Imperial Leather.

  ‘Do I smell any better?’

  ‘Faintly.’

  They sat on the verandah drinking beer while the long, slow twilight deepened. It was an extraordinary feeling, he said, to have ordinary pleasures back again.

  He put the Esky up on the verandah table, and lifted the lid. ‘Bertram Junior said this was for my missus.’ Sharon gagged. It stank. It wasn’t that the meat was off exactly, he said defensively. It was fatty, dusty, smoky, and only faintly green. It was fine. ‘I’ve cooked plenty gamier than this. If you like, I’ll cook it up later and we can have it cold.’

  ‘It will do for the dogs.’

  When it was dark Marie and Ella set a white tablecloth and lit candles. They had prepared a celebration — Turkish dips, Indian boiled eggs, flat bread and olives. They were better cooks than he was, though he spoilt the compliment by boasting he’d taught them how, by insisting they use recipe books. Irene played with the boxes of leftover shearing stores. She loved the UHT milk, warm from travelling, and his plastic bin of egglifters, beaters, and plastic bowls. Her key ring ballerina dangled from a sharpening steel. She wanted to know when he was going away again, so that he could bring back something else. ‘Bubblegum?’ she pleaded.

  Different corners of the house had been put to different uses since he left — homework was being done in a sort of cushion nest in a corner; the sewing machine was out, surrounded by scraps of material and tissue paper patterns; the TV and vi
deo player were in a new spot, with a scatter of crayons and drawing books. The changes were like a message: Don’t think when you go away, will you, that you are the only one who travels. Books and papers that he had always kept in the bedroom in a squalid, unapproachable pile, were all gathered up now and put in a box that had been taken out to his workroom, where he could decide what he wanted to do with them.

  There was a cautious, almost impalpable air of self-protection in the household that he had never sensed before. He felt sad to think that he had brought it on, but when he thought about what he could do to modify its meaning, he thought he could do nothing.

  He walked from room to room feeling the vibrancy of colours in rugs, bedspreads and white-painted walls after the murkiness of huts. The sense of space, light and cleanliness astounded him. Hefty shapes no longer shouldered him, making demands. He fingered the pages of novels he wanted to read. The print had a raised dimension on the page, a sensuous relation to the fibres of the paper. He would have time to read if the phone didn’t ring for a few days. The act of reading hit him with a rush of greedy desire. Nothing cutting across the night, no insistent pocket alarm. Just by coming back he found this part of himself again.

  Exhausted, he lay down and fell asleep on the double bed. Sharon came in later and leant over him. His eyes blinked open into hers. He pushed the door shut with his heel, and his arms went around her. It was pitch dark outside. A mopoke sounded from the bush paddock. Why couldn’t it always be like this? Messy emotions banished. No one issuing a challenge. A feeling of setting sail on the tide. Quiet voices, records playing, the clink of cutlery from several rooms away.