—D-don’t want the tea, t-thanks.
Chloe stated as a matter of fact that Stammer Jack knew me.
—Yeah, t-that’s right. Last t-t-time you were here. You seen m-my son over there?
—Three weeks ago. The future’s pretty bright for Jacko.
—Yeah, see. But what about poor b-bloody Lucy?
—Well, Chloe argued. He’s not to tell the mongrel about Lucy. Unless Lucy gives the okay.
—That little b-bastard, said Stammer Jack. Needs his b-brains brushed. I m-might just go over there with you and get the bugger sorted out! On the one hand, l-life’s not a b-bloody rehearsal, but on the other, you can have too big a c-cast!
This was the longest speech I had heard Stammer Jack make, and true as it was, I felt it was time to acquaint them with their son’s virtues.
—Were you aware who brought Delia and Sunny here? Who paid their fares and so on?
—Sutherland, said Chloe. That’s what they tell us. What’s it called? Vixen Six. What a name! Jacko’s pack of bloody clowns eh. Vixen bloody Six. What’s that character’s name, Durkin? Jesus!
—Vixen Six didn’t pay for them. Jacko did. Roughly ten or eleven thousand dollars – because you can’t buy a single ticket to Australia. Paid for the tickets out of his own pocket. And the same week another ticket for Lucy. Which was only right, of course. But the same week he was dumping Lucy, or Lucy was dumping him, he was saving Sunny.
The parents considered this together in silence. Stammer Jack was the first one to speak.
—Well, he was always generous to a b-bloody fault.
—His bloody generosity is about to be tested, said Chloe.
Chloe then called into the garden.
—Sunny, why don’t you go and tell Lucy her playmate’s here?
—Okay, called Sunny, putting her cup down under a fern for collection later. But I won’t want to interrupt her if she’s painting.
We watched Sunny dawdle off once more through the garden and out of the gate into Emptorville’s full blaze of light. I felt like standing and calling a warning to her. Careful of the light!
—She’s still under a heap of medication you know, Chloe thunderously whispered. Boomer flies her off to the psychiatrist in Darwin every two weeks. But it’s a pretty good recovery, isn’t it? Of course, out here, people expect you to recover and get on with bloody things. It’s a therapeutic atmosphere eh. You know, she doesn’t wake screaming in the night or anything. Sleeps well, eats well, works well. You’d never think …
—Jacko’s creative idea, I said.
—Yeah, there you go, said Stammer Jack. His instincts are ok-kay. But his f-f-fucking wires are crossed.
She reached out for Stammer Jack’s enormous hand, so creased, so mapped with mysterious scars, and slotted her fingers into the maw of his slack fist.
I wish Larson had been there to photograph them.
The sun, which an hour and a half before had bludgeoned me by the side of my rented Holden, had begun dropping fast now. It always sets quickly above the Tropic of Capricorn. At this kindly hour, the Emptors’ stubbornly retained acreage and square mileages were turning from mauve to violet, and the huge space of pounded dirt amongst the buildings – the stockyards, the homestead and the sales ring – turned violet too, as if from some internal chemistry. Across the violet I saw Lucy stiffly walking with Sunny. Sunny reached the homestead gate first and opened it for her. It was easy now to see the reason for Lucy’s stiff gait. She was pregnant.
As she drew near I beheld her enormous smile, which reminded me of how she danced in the Odeon.
—Gidday, she cried.
She made it to the verandah and sat with a sigh.
—Well, she said, breathing heavily. A bun in the oven eh?
I found it hard to answer her.
Dinner came later than I would have wanted. We had to wait until after the stockmen had eaten and gone off to watch television. We ate in their dining room, which was located by the kitchen, between the quarters which Lucy, myself and – more permanently – the unmarried white stockmen occupied and the school. The table was set for eight. Chloe sat at one end, and I felt honoured to be on her right side. Lucy sat on her left. And then down the table Delia and hulking Petie, Sunny and Boomer sitting side by side, one couple (if that was a way to describe them) facing the other. And at the foot of the table but to the side, not in the spousal position, sat the ageing stockman called Merv.
I remembered the night, while Larson was still alive, that Chloe had boasted to us in mime of Merv’s sexual capacity. I was encouraged to remember it because of the fact that shy Stammer Jack must have eaten a reclusive meal somewhere else. Perhaps he was now doing the books, settling to his evening drinking, or watching the 7:30 Report and being mutely appalled at the opinions of people who lived in cities in New South Wales and Victoria, in urban nests of liberalism where the name of the Territory cut no ice.
Everyone at the table spoke about my misadventure, which I had to recount. Boomer and Sunny ate quietly without mentioning the corkscrew. Delia, who was wearing a long sleeved shirt, complained pleasantly about the impact of the sun upon her complexion. And for her sake, Chloe said what she seemed to say to all newcomers.
—Well, no bugger sunbathes up here. It would be a sign of bloody madness. You look at the old timers. Merv, hold your arm up. See that! See that eh? Buttoned to the bloody wrist!
—I love living here, said Delia.
Like Sunny, she had the blush of this country on her. Delia continued her argument.
—If we were in New York now, we’d be stewing in humidity. I put up with it because I didn’t know better things were available. Australians think they’ve got a bad climate. But they don’t know what a bad climate is.
Chloe said, Well that’s how buggered up America is eh. Americans come to a bloody hole like this and think it’s paradise. Let me tell you, Delia love, if that old bastard in the homestead could be trusted, I’d swap New York with you right now. The cattle industry’s rooted, and Australia’s gone to the dogs.
—What would you do in New York, Chloe?
—What would I do? I’d start going to the literary bars. And I’d start writing some fiction of my own. I could write in a city like New York. I’ve seen it through Saul Bellow’s eyes, and they’re pretty good bloody eyes to see it through. Nobel Laureate, like someone else I could mention.
—You’re mad, Chloe, said Boomer. The Ayatollah was right. America’s the great Satan.
He was one of those disenchanted by Vietnam. Jacko told me he may have deserted during Rest and Recreation in Sydney.
—I think you’re mad too, Chloe, said Lucy quietly, winking across the table at me. You can write just as well here I reckon. I’m doing more work here than I ever found possible in New York.
Now I was surprised to hear Petie chime in.
He said, Well, what Chloe’s saying is the Territory’s not like it was. Maybe so. But it’ll do me eh. Our abattoir in town’s really starting to do good business with the Saudis. If we could just sell a bit more beef to the Americans and the Indonesians, we’d be laughing.
—They’ve got these Arab abattoir supervisors in Hector, said Chloe. To make sure the cattle are slaughtered right. If your bloody sister was still around, she’d probably fall for one of them and go Muslim just to bloody spite me.
There was, of course, enough steak on the table to suggest the Emptors had plenty for export.
Sunny had finished working at her own lump of meat and rose with her plate in her hands. She looked around for others who had finished. Lucy was one of them.
—Pass over your plate, Mrs Emptor Junior, she told her. I’ll get the dessert.
Chloe said, No, listen. You’ll end up a bloody slavey like me.
But Sunny was already gone.
—Well, while you’re out there, called Chloe, get the useless bloody cook to make up another pot of tea.
Petie looked at me and winked.
> —We’re getting all these bloody Yanks used to tea, he mildly boasted.
Delia was mopping her lips and quenching a small burp. All her movements were those of a woman who knew and had confidence in her company, a woman at her own hearth. She smiled at me.
—You couldn’t drink coffee, anyhow, in this sort of climate, she said. Except recreationally. It’d dehydrate you.
At the bottom of the table, Merv had lit a cigarette and was quietly drinking, a vigilant look in his eye, as if he expected this particular company to say something really clever. Chloe watched him closely through narrowed eyes. It all seemed so easeful to me. I too almost felt as if I’d come home.
Lucy leaned over the table towards me.
—Would you like to take a preggers woman for a walk after dinner?
I said that that would be an honour.
—That’s the go then eh, said Lucy. You can approve of my paintings too if you like.
Under the three-quarter moon, the earth had softened and could be believed to be velvet. Just as when I was last here, stockmen were drinking beneath a big brush shelter, and watching a big television set.
Even from the way she walked – and discounting for the moment her pregnancy – you could tell Lucy had not had a good time of it. I noticed how her long neck was stringy, little Jacko – I presumed it was Jacko’s child, but I had not heard this asserted by anyone – already plundering his mother of the minerals of her youth. Her pregnancy in its way emphasized her thinness which was of a different order from what I thought of as her New York lankiness.
—I suppose you think I’m pretty damn silly, she said.
—Why?
—Well, I’m up here, swearing everyone to bloody secrecy. You’d think if I wanted to keep it secret, I’d clear out.
—You ought to consider telling Jacko.
—I’m sort of disappointed you think it’s Jacko’s?
—Well, let me say, I wouldn’t blame you if it wasn’t.
—Well, it’s bloody Jacko’s. But women who get pregnant to stop things busting up are a bit of a cliché, aren’t they?
—Anything that works, in my opinion.
—As soon as I found out, I came up here. It wasn’t visible then. I said that as soon as it began to look visible I’d go back to Sydney eh. But the thought of that fills me with horror. In Sydney I’m an angry woman, and I don’t know what to make of myself. So you won’t report back to him, will you?
This was a gentler form of Chloe’s accusation that I was a spy.
—I ask you to imagine what my life would be like if my wife and your friend, Maureen, found out I had leaked embargoed information to Jacko.
She laughed at that, remembering Maureen.
—If I stay here, she said, and he turns up, I won’t be able to tell whether he’s here to see Chloe or me. I really ought to go somewhere else. But … Chloe’s a bit of an addiction with me. And Sunny … at least I can look at Sunny. She doesn’t need me here of course. But I think I need to see her around the place. Because … believe me!… she’s not nearly as well as she looks. Walking wounded eh.
—Does Jacko talk as if a reconciliation’s still on?
—Well, that’s what he tells me, every time he calls on the radio-telephone.
—I wouldn’t give him too long, I advised her.
It was as near as I could come to telling her what I knew of Jacko. If she could have somehow seen a video clip from the dinner at which Jacko had made his unwise moves on Hubert Greenspan’s mistress, she could hardly have been surprised, though she would have been enlightened.
—Do you think he’s fit for marriage with anyone? Lucy asked.
—Jesus! That’s a terrible question to ask me.
—But just do me a favour and say whether you think he’s fit for it.
In such a deep night, north of Capricorn, amidst such impending and inhuman spaces, I did not want to say something that would torment her and spoil her small, human sleep.
—I think he could certainly be educated to marriage.
She laughed the old, rich Odeon laugh.
—Like Stammer Jack’s been? Anyhow, that didn’t hurt you too much eh? Lowering the mateship barrier.
—I think he could be educated and coerced. Your brand of education seemed to me to go very, very gently with him.
—Well sorry. I thought I could influence him. I was hard on him in private. But not in public you know. In public I think it’s disloyal to kick up a fuss. I thought that when my parents bunged on public scenes. It didn’t seem to help them much. If I did act up, it’d work the other way with him. He might take it from some other woman. Look, come and see these paintings of mine.
She was pleased to drag me away from the dusty plaza and the whole subject. She led me to her room in the brick stockmen’s quarters. It was nondescript, but it had two beds. On one of the beds and around the walls and either side of the wash basin lay a number of canvases and sheets of board.
I thought they were very competent, lively impressionist and abstract versions of the Burren Waters landscape. Since she was working on technique, they were repetitive, like Monet’s water lilies or haystacks. Worked over and over, in all conditions of Burren Waters light. She’d managed to turn the Emptor house into something more mysterious than itself.
I told her I thought they were wonderful.
—Come on, she said. You’re just saying that.
—What would I know anyhow. But I like them enormously. Any for sale?
—I’ll give you one.
The truth was I wished I could have conveyed how startling this display of her work seemed; a real phenomenon in the lee of her leaving Jacko.
—I don’t know; it really keeps me occupied. You can’t get that result out of playing the cello eh. It keeps me so busy. The paintings don’t satisfy me in retrospect, when they’re lying around the room, but making them satisfies me.
I could understand that. Compared to the imponderables of writing and music, painting was a sort of busy and absorbing art.
As we stood looking at the canvases, she asked, So, is he living with Dannie?
—Didn’t you know they fell out so badly over the Sondquist business? He behaved with real style, and Dannie hated it. As far as I know he’s not living with anyone. I don’t want to raise any stupid hopes, but he misses you in his way.
—Oh yeah. In his way eh. Got to be careful of that way. I suppose I’ll stay up here and give birth to the child, and still expect everyone to keep it a secret.
Putting my arms around her for no more than a friendly – probably a paternal – hug, I believed I could feel, through the flesh of my small paunch earned in distant bars with Jacko, the beat of her child’s heart, or maybe just the pulse of its energetic growing. The heart of a riotous, reproduced Jacko. She carried that beloved enemy.
I asked her that night if she wanted to come back to Sydney with me, and try the city again. She could stay at the beach with Maureen and me. But she said no.
Three times, as far as I remember.
Back in my room, I lay on my bed fully clothed. When you grew still at Burren Waters, you were aware of an edginess in the atmosphere. The place was on a cusp, where water-laden air from the Timor and Arafura Seas ran up against the super-dried air from the Tanami and other deserts. You couldn’t sleep at ease unless you were used to these ionic complications. Besides, I was woken from my first few minutes dozing by the muted voices of women outside. What did these voices mean? Was something being plotted? Punishment of Stammer Jack? Of Jacko? Of me as a subscriber to the same chromosomes?
I had reached a paranoid hour.
In the end I fought off the leadenness and dropped my feet to the floor and – against a terrible weight of gravity – rose to go and see where these persistent voices came from.
It was Chloe and Sunny Sondquist. Both barefooted, they trod the mauve dust of the homestead square. They were pretty clearly delineated by moonlight. Chloe wore a mumu, Sunny a li
ght floral dress. As they strolled, Chloe would sometimes lag, as if the air was getting at her, but would catch up. I could hear that it was Sunny doing most of the talking. They passed the hangar where Boomer’s corkscrew beast slept. As they drew level with the sales ring, Sunny reached back and linked arms with Chloe, and the two smiled at each other. Sunny kept talking, but you’d hear the occasional rumble of Chloe’s sentences – waivers, questions, counsels.
They were sisters under the constellation of Capricorn, under a sky bright as lunacy. They strolled across the dust, and now they were a daughter and mother, the one dragging the other off to a shop to look at a dress. I heard Chloe say Bloody hell! and laugh.
They were heading back to the homestead now, along the line of the stockmen’s quarters, the cookhouse, the office. I stepped back into my room a little. They would pass my door. I have to admit I had tears in my eyes, for Sunny the maimed daughter of course, but for Chloe’s maternal kindness too. The crazed Senate candidate had become something else, something supra-political, under the uneasy moon.
Sunny was chatting away in a subdued voice, but as she passed my door, I heard what she was saying.
—Legerdemain – L-E-G-E-R-D-E-M-A-I-N. Anodyne – A-N-O-D-Y-N-E. Polymorphic – P-O-L-Y-M-O-R-P-H-I-C …
21
My wife in particular loved returning to New York in its first chill, the last of its summer humidity. The leaves in Washington Square were at that stage investing themselves in their last brave flare of colour. Maureen found the East Village, which purists said did not exist, a genuine community. The manager of Shakespeare’s bookshop knew her, as did the Korean dry cleaners, and the Italian-Americans in the postal service at La Guardia Place. There were people in Dean and Deluca’s who welcomed her back. She knew the actress who made the gourmet sandwiches in Mercer Street, still under-employed at the end of the summer, still waiting for the summoning voice.
When we went back to the Grand Ticino for the first time, the maitre d’ welcomed her like a cousin from Trieste. And if she shopped at night at the local general store, again Korean, the managers would send their second oldest chunk of a son to get her home safely.