A Long Way From Home

  Mrs Bobbsey pushed closer into the firelight so her face was illuminated in a way that would have had Clover talking of Caravaggio. Later she would say she had been frightened, not just by the danger to the battery, but the hostile eyes around her, peering from the dark.

  W hen the Lucas battery – Lucas, Prince of Darkness, as the saying goes – when the Lucas 12 volt was placed on the corrugated iron her shoulders dropped and the firelight revealed a most profound exhaustion on her dirty face. It was then that two children, two girls, perhaps five and ten years old, were sent to drape a blanket around her shoulders. Clearly she feared the dirt. The girls, in any case, did not thrust their sympathy at her. They observed her from the middle distance, squatting, with their arms around their knees. And only when the moon rose, throwing tangled melaleuca shadows across their faces, was it possible to see their good intentions.

  The battery was finally removed from the heat and placed on the dirt before us. We were told that ‘he’ (i.e. the battery) was strong now and I finally understood they had used heat to get some bounce into the electrons.

  When our ‘robber’ returned the battery it was almost too hot to handle. I rushed it back through the moonlight to the car with Mrs Bobbsey close beside me whispering.

  ‘What is he? Medicine man?’ she said. ‘What next? What do they want?’

  Just the same it was she who was the boss. He might know the magic but it was Mrs Bobs who must reattach the cables. The battery sparked violently and she was suddenly angry.

  ‘You coming or not?’ she asked her benefactor.

  ‘We sit down this place,’ he said, I think.

  ‘No waiting,’ she said. ‘Mount Isa next. Big hurry.’

  ‘Start him,’ ordered our passenger, making a motion as if cranking up the engine.

  And of course it started, and of course the generator ran the lights.

  ‘Lochy Peterson,’ he said and shook her hand.

  ‘Irene Bobbsey,’ she said.

  One hour after our engine had failed, we were back on the road again, just me and Irene Bobbsey and her small white knees.

  4

  The smell of a rally car, the stink, the whiff, the woo, you will never find the recipe for this pong in the Women’s Weekly but ingredients include petrol, rubber, pollen, dust, orange peel, wrecked banana, armpit, socks, man’s body. I drove into the night on the ratshit regulator. My headlights waxed and waned depending on the engine revs. Beneath us was bulldust, two feet thick. It was always smooth and soft-looking but the Holden banged and thudded like an aluminium dinghy hitting rock. It is a miracle our suspension didn’t melt. Sometimes I saw the shock absorbers on a car in front, white hot, glowing like X-rays. Cattle loomed from the blackness and if I had rolled or hit a roo, if I killed us all, what then? What would my son and daughter say about me? What did Mummy imagine she was doing? She must have been so selfish, up herself completely.

  Dunstan came into my mind. I did not imagine I also was in his. My thoughts sometimes left the road, circled the little black girls, their precious blanket. I had not even folded it. I had not thanked them. I imagined myself behaving properly, walking across that bare hard earth and laying the neat blanket at their feet. I ate caffeine tablets and raisins.

  The FJ Holden had a bench seat and my navigator was sometimes pushed hard against the cardboard box. I thought about the little boy and what we were obliged to do with him. I thought, Bachhuber wants me. I was certain. You cannot be so close to a man and not think about these things. I had lain in bed and listened to him with my sister and imagined things I should not have.

  He was on the caffeine too. He cried wolf for a giant snake as fat as an oil drum. He was seeing things, reporting abos running beside the road in long white shirts. We almost missed a culvert. White groundsel seed floated in the dark like broken pillows. The seed that made my babies had blown against my door. I never regretted it, never wanted any more. I had never expected I might have laughed so much, or felt so much, and what we did with our bodies was unimaginable. Titch was the first man on earth to put his mouth down there. I thought he had invented it.

  What was his plan when he married me? He taught me to drive. He was popular and funny but who can guess what’s going on inside the human skin. He wore long-sleeved shirts, always buttoned, to hide his scars. Cigarette burns. These were for me to see, to cry for on our wedding night. So this is why he shines, I realised then. So this is why he jokes. I held his perfect head against my breast, and had no clue about the damage.

  We never spoke about what had been done to him, and he would reveal no more about his injuries than he did about his mother. The perpetrator was either Dan with his constant ciggies, or it was Dan leaving him alone with priests or bachelors. In terms of scars, how many had it cost to teach each customer to drive? Had this made him cunning?

  I thought it was my job to save my husband from his helpless sonny-love. I was his wife, his protector. I had always honoured that sacred vow. But when he wished to give up the Redex on account of that cruel skite, no, no, never.

  I destroyed a spring on a rocky outcrop 38.9 miles from Cloncurry, clearly marked. And why was I not warned? Because Bachhuber had been drunk on caffeine, seeing ‘megafauna’. Whatever that was.

  In order to repair the spring we must perform the drill Titch had taught us, lying underneath the car together. We were close by necessity, shoulder to shoulder, sliding the shackle bolt from the oily spring. There could be no such thing as manners when he shoved a block of wood between the spring eye and floor, and his rough arm was against my cheek, and then we jacked the spring up and moved the eye along the wood until the shackle could be fitted and then my mouth was on his mouth. Dear Jesus, that’s enough, not even thirty seconds of my life.

  ‘We’ll never speak of this again.’

  He returned to calling out GRID and CURVE and CREEK and two hours later we were at the Mount Isa Control with only the oil stain on my chest to tell the tale of those minutes when Bachhuber, his hand above my bottom, had pulled me hard against him. We signed in. Then I was the boss lady, giving orders for refuelling. I ran a check on engine compression which was a waste of money. The Redex drivers with the narrow waists and rolled up sleeves were much less slick than when we saw them last. They waved. We gave them the false impression that Titch was sleeping in the back. I located a telegraph operator named Mr Gilbert, working late as a special favour to the drivers. I wrote: TITCHBOBS c/- MASSON’S UNDERTAKERS, CHARTERS TOWERS. I LOVE YOU SORRY ARRIVING DARWIN TOMORROW.

  The navigator slept beneath the car, me in the back seat, as everybody saw.

  In the morning I called the kids from the post office. Beverly was comforting. Mr Gilbert came round the counter to deliver a telegram from Titch. DO NOT ENTER DARWIN CONTROL WAIT AT WATER SUPPLY LINE BERRY CREEK 181.1 MILES ON STRIP MAP T-D 14. T. BOBS.

  I thought, thank God. He is coming to get me, but how will he pay for an air ticket? I telegrammed NO POINTS LOST but would not pay for LOVE.

  There were outdoor showers at the caravan park. There I spied the top half of Bachhuber bare. An awful scar, a scoop from his flesh, a wound made by something like a melon baller.

  I rolled up coats and blankets in the back seat so Control would imagine the third crew member was fast asleep. We got a push start from some blacks and paid them ten bob which they thought was not enough.

  As we drove out of Mount Isa the navigator touched my cheek with the back of his broad hand.

  ‘Don’t get ideas,’ I said.

  A Jaguar went past at ninety miles an hour. It would be every pedal to the metal until 181.1 MILES ON STRIP MAP whatever was going to happen there.

  5

  Bachhuber was a nervous driver. It was only kindness that made him offer to take the wheel between Mount Isa and Darwin. The road was bitumen, as he pointed out. And I would have let him, I should have. It was my own fault that I must drive for hours without a wink of sleep. I lost time. I was slowed by mobs of cattle,
four hundred at a time, on their way to a ship in Darwin and thenceforth to their deaths. Our supposed average was 44 mph, but you could not hurry through the bullocks, and the abo stockmen walked them at the speed they wished to go.

  These beasts got off the road at night, but there were still stray bullocks and roos and apparitions visible only to my navigator. He said the country had once been occupied by wallabies twenty feet tall.

  As we approached Darwin I was slowed once more by cattle. Their escort of blowflies came to feast upon my sweaty face. It was in their company I arrived at the rendezvous described by the telegram: WATER SUPPLY LINE BERRY CREEK 181.1 MILES ON STRIP MAP T-D 14. Here I stopped the car.

  Due to the jiggered regulator I had to leave the engine idling. I waited. I saw nothing but red earth, a lonely barbed wire fence, a cluster of old signs LIVINGSTONE AIRSTRIP, HUMPTY DOO NOT THIS WAY, which I did not understand. There was also PILOT’S MESS, an open-sided shed strangled by allamanda vine, bright green and yellow flowers. Boys must have died here, Japanese or Australian or both, and now their so-called Pilot’s Mess had been invaded by a mob of blacks and piccaninnies. The steers and drovers pushed on past.

  So I waited for my husband. The bullocks bumped against the car and I felt their warm soft shoving. The passing abo stockmen could not have guessed that the sweaty white woman could always judge a bullock pretty fair.

  We brushed and slapped at flies as the minutes passed. Finally a vehicle came towards us, its lights shining through the dust. Could this be him, in a Volkswagen? He stopped in front, nose to nose.

  Not him. Where was he? This driver was a dork and dill: brand-new Akubra hat, tight shorts, fat legs, brand-new elastic sided stockman’s boots. This was what is called a Southern Wonder.

  ‘Open up,’ he cried.

  It was not until he was in amongst the toolkits and fuel cans that I recognised him.

  ‘Mr Dunstan.’

  ‘No, no.’ He winked into my rear view mirror. ‘I am Mr Shearer from Ballarat.’

  But it was Dunstan, as pale as a funeral director with that fat moustache occupying all his upper lip. He was pressing something on me, a small purple crepe paper parcel. I was, of course, reminded of an earlier occasion when he had wished to show his ‘appreciation’.

  ‘Can you fit a new regulator?’

  ‘You’re still at GMH?’ I asked him because I was honestly bewildered by his presence so far from his proper place.

  ‘If GMH knew about this I’d be a dead man.’

  I asked had he spoken to my husband.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said, and I thought, what new deceit is this?

  ‘You’ve spoken to him?’

  ‘No-one has seen me or spoken to me, OK? Including you. Can you fit the new regulator? It’s painted with the proper fairy dust, if you get my meaning.’

  ‘This is a regulator?’

  ‘No, it’s a string of bloody pearls.’

  ‘I’ll need a jump-start afterwards. Yes, I can fit it.’

  ‘By yourself ?’

  ‘Where is my husband?’

  ‘You must be the only competitor who would leave their driver stranded.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Don’t get your panties in a twist. He’s on his way. Now. Can you fit that regulator? Do you have the tools?’

  As Dunstan asked this last insulting question Bachhuber twisted in his seat to fetch the smaller kit.

  ‘As for your navigator,’ said the Southern Wonder, ‘he is wanted by the law.’

  Willie tugged the toolkit free and set it on his lap. ‘That is a misrepresentation of the situation,’ he said quietly. He lifted the lid and offered me my choice of tools, holding the red metal box as if it contained shortbread or chocolate biscuits. I selected what I needed for the job at hand.

  ‘What if you win, Mr Bachhuber?’ Dunstan asked. ‘The newspapers will represent your situation just as I did. Have you thought of what damage this would do? Have you considered your position as a member of the crew?’

  I told him we had already lost a driver. Did he intend we should dismiss the navigator too?

  ‘You have not lost a driver, Mrs Bobs.’

  ‘Last time I saw my husband he was in Charters Towers.’

  ‘Yes, and the next time you see him you will be very bloody nice to him. That will be in Broome. If anybody asks, he never left the car. He will be there when we cross the finish line.’

  We? I asked him why is a man from General Motors in a Volkswagen, and why is he three thousand miles from where he should be?

  ‘I’m a backer.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Ask your husband when you see him.’

  I thought, I have been a dupe. I have been made a mug of. Everybody knows I have been deceived.

  ‘Who got you your sponsors? Do you even know?’

  No I didn’t know. I could have wept but I would not, not in front of this creature who would not know a regulator from his bumhole. I turned off the ignition. I popped the catch on the bonnet and took my tools and the regulator. And of course my navigator was going to assist me with the hot electrics, and I welcomed him, his gentle familiarity and his restraint. I trusted his feelings for me. I trusted his honour and his calm.

  ‘You!’ said the venomous pencil pusher in the back seat. This was how he addressed my dear and decent friend. ‘You are Willem August Bachhuber?’

  I told Dunstan to get off the poor man’s back. We had driven twenty-four hours and if he would just stop yammering a mo, if we could ever get a jump-start, we could still make Control on time and let the battery charge.

  ‘You placed your crew in jeopardy,’ he said. ‘You are in arrears with child support?’

  I asked him was he still employed by GMH.

  ‘There are more important interests in this car.’

  ‘Your name is Dunstan, not Shearer.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said, and turned to Bachhuber. ‘Your life is a grubby mess. When we win the reporters will find your wife and son. Do you really want to do that to Mr and Mrs Bobs? You’re shitting over everything.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong fellow, Mr Dunstan,’ he replied, and I was pleased that he stepped out of the car, and pleased also that he walked away, up the road. He picked up a stone and threw it far ahead. I had never seen him lose his temper but I judged it would be a fair explosion when it finally happened. I told Dunstan to piss off and leave us. It was a first for me.

  6

  The last thing I required was alcohol, but beer was the Bobbseys’ cure for every ailment and Irene asked would I please accompany her to the pub because she was ‘not comfortable’ with Dunstan.

  I said she should stay away from the schemer.

  That was no-can-do, as she expressed it. But we could drink here, she said, meaning the old Larapinta Hotel, of which she had, moments before, been loudly critical. (She had never seen a place so filthy. I was lucky I would sleep in the car.) It was true, the hotel was a rough and dirty place, perched on long fat legs across from the railway yards, in a sour effluvium of meatworks and flagon wine. It advertised ‘sea views’ and there it was, indeed, beyond the broken scrub and grass, the misty Timor Sea disappearing in the dusk. In the foreground, across the street, a sign announced there was to be NO DRINKING, NO GAMBLING, NO HUMBUG, although this was obviously intended for those behind the rear side of the sign, scattered groups of blacks gathered around their smoky fires.

  Mrs Bobbsey ’s presence made it necessary for her male companions to drink in the so-called Virgins’ Parlour. Thank God, I thought when I beheld the public bar crammed with argumentative hard-faced whites. I wondered about the single blackfellah in their midst. He looked exactly the same as that battery doctor fellah who had saved our skin. It was him. It must be. He was staring at me across the bar. Better leave here, I thought.

  Then the toxic sweaty Dunstan told Mrs B that he hoped she had locked her vehicle. If not, it would be stripped clean like a chicken carcass. I
offered to attend to it.

  That damned stare was waiting on my return, no longer in the public bar but in the Virgins’ Parlour where the black man positioned himself with his long back against the wall. He raised his beer to me.

  ‘Battery doctor?’

  ‘Mr Redex.’

  Of course I shook his hand.

  A penny flew across the room and bounced over the bar. Only later did I think I was the cause of it.

  ‘You got along the road pretty fast. Lochy? Lochy Peterson?’

  ‘Lochy. Come drink with me.’

  Of course I did not drink, but I would not give offence. I turned to find the wall-faced bartender was already paying close attention.

  ‘Dog tag,’ he demanded.

  ‘He’s with us,’ called Dunstan. ‘My shout.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter if he’s with the Prince of bloody Wales. I need to see the certificate of exemption.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Dunstan.

  ‘Why would you?’ said the bartender, speaking over his shoulder as he filled the glass of a young woman who had tattooed herself with nails or darning needles.

  ‘Woof woof,’ she said, and laughed.

  ‘Look here,’ said Dunstan.

  ‘It’s alright, mate,’ the bartender said, ‘I can see you’re from down south. All I’m asking mate, does this chap have his pass, his dog tag?’

  I turned to find myself the subject of Lochy Peterson’s bloodshot yellow eyes.

  ‘Better you come,’ he said.

  ‘You’re serving me,’ said Mrs Bobbsey. ‘You can serve my navigator too.’

  ‘Show them, Lochy,’ said the bartender and the black man paused, considered me, and finally produced, from deep in his trouser pocket, a crumpled piece of paper which the white man, careless of the wet surface, spread out beneath his hand so I could read: General Certificate of Exemption. This document entitles the bearer, HALF CASTE Aboriginal known as LOCHY PETERSON (1) to leave Quamby Downs Station, (2) to walk freely through town without being arrested, (3) to enter a ship or hotel (individual may not be served – at proprietor’s discretion). N.B: Speaking in Native Language prohibited.