—Help you, dear? he asked edgily.
—I was looking for accommodation.
She could not stop her head from shaking slightly sideways—that had been happening, a flick of the head which might look deliberate but which was beyond her will.
—We’ve got some rooms.
He cried out over a shoulder.
—Connie, watch the bar will you?
A woman’s voice, young, asked why. It sounded querulous in a habitual way.
—Someone wants to look at a room.
One of the travelers at the bar said, Jesus, Jack, you’d better get that lady up the stairs before Connie sees you.
There was a waspish titter from the old man at the end of the bar. A knowing rustle of resigned and barely requited male desire. Jack turned to the traveler in the big hat.
—Get fucked, Ian.
The publican grabbed a key from the wall beneath the rum and whiskey bottles. He signaled to Kate that she should move parallel to him along the bar and meet around the corner in the saloon. So it happened. The saloon was a little bar. It would be cozier on a winter’s night.
He then led her out into the hallway where she’d first entered and up the stairway. Paneled in cedar, its texture had been subdued by layers of varnish. The upper walls were metal molding, the sort of thing those Victorians and Edwardians who had desired to fill the world with mass-produced houses and hotels had manufactured and sent to the remotest places. Fleur-de-lis pattern, all painted cream.
The large man called Jack was half turned back to her, looking down as he climbed the stairs.
—You know we’ve got a lot of tradesmen here, working on the flood damage.
—No, I didn’t know that.
—Thought you might.
—No.
—That bugger down there’s right. Connie’ll give me hell. So no contract exists between you and me, love. I’m just showing you the room, as required by the licensing law, and that’s it. I’m not saying I’m renting it yet. I need to know a few things …
Kate felt a sort of mist of fatigue rise up her limbs.
—What things?
—Look, you don’t look like a traveling woman. Just the same, you can’t work out of a place like this. If that’s what you want. I’d lose my license.
—Work? No one’s mentioned work to you.
—You know what I mean, love. I’ve had girls stay here before and try to work the bar. The former owner ran the place like that. He took the risk. I can’t, love. Because (a) I’m mortgaged up to my armpits, (b) Connie wouldn’t let it happen, (c) There’s such a thing as the bloody licensing laws of New South Wales.
—You think I’m a prostitute? I simply want a room. Though if you wanted a reliable employee …
—Christ, an employee?
He had paused on the top step, by the gigantic, dark upstairs corridor of Murchison’s Railway Hotel.
—You know how to do that, love? Barmaiding?
—I believe I could learn pretty fast.
—You believe …
He shook his vast, meaty head in a twice-shy way.
—Not that it’s simple, I know. But I would really love to do some work like that. Repetitive. I could wash up if you wished.
—What work did you do before?
—I worked in an office.
—What’s your name?
—Kate Gaffney.
—Have you been in jail or something? Or a psychiatric hospital? Something like that?
—No. Do I look like it?
—Well, a man can always use barstaff from Thursday onwards. But Jesus, you’re a good-looking girl. Connie wouldn’t trust me round you. Look, I never go near other women. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. But Connie doesn’t believe in me, I know it. It’s her way.
—I might try one of the other places.
—Hold hard. I’d hate to see someone as pretty as you go off to the Federal or the Commercial. There are some pretty rough pubs in this town. I know you’re thinking how I don’t look like a disciplinarian. But I bloody am. I keep a good discipline. On myself, too. Pub discipline starts with the publican. Jesus, there’s some awful bastards in a town like this. Blokes from up the river who attack their little sisters. You’d be safe here, but I wouldn’t swear by the other places, not at all.
They were in the comfortless dark upstairs corridor now.
—Look, I’ve got to be square with you. I can see you being okay for business here. But Jesus, we don’t even know each other. Kate, is it? Look at the room for a start, Kate.
He opened a door. It was the very essence of room, the room she’d dreamed of on the train. Three-quarter bed, a lowboy. A blind. A bedlamp. A chair and a washbasin. One picture—a scene of the Gwydir River, cut from a calendar and framed.
—Ladies’ along the verandah. It’s not the Regent Hotel, but we keep it clean. The artwork isn’t exactly Picasso.
He tapped the glass of the picture.
—Eighteen dollars for breakfast and dinner. Hearty bush tucker, I can promise you. We can make an arrangement on a weekly rate if …
—If Connie likes me.
—Exactly, love. And not only that. You bring one man across this threshold, and you’re on your lovely little backside out in the street. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night. I’m still finding my way with the licensing police up here. You do understand me, don’t you?
Kate was tiring of Jack Murchison’s instructive tone. She undid the top button of her cardigan and dragged both the wool and the shirt beneath it away to expose her left shoulder.
—Do you see that?
Jack squinted at what Kate knew confidently to be a disfigured, deathly, lumpy parody of flesh.
—Jesus!
—Hard to make a living as a tart with shoulders like that.
—Jesus. Sorry, love.
His head was half turned away, and he was anxious for her to cover her shoulders again.
—Room’s yours.
—And what about the job?
—You stick round till Poet’s Day, we’ll try you out.
—Poet’s Day?
—Yes. Friday, love. Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday. Poet’s Day.
—And you’re Mr. Murchison?
—Jack. Wife’s Connie. She’s an ethnic. Greek. Old man owns a café in Goondiwindi. Set us up in this place. Really did me a favor. Jesus!
He was not ironic about it. He was filially grateful.
From the bottom of the stairs, the Greek wife could be heard crying.
—Jack? Jack? You have to rig up another CO-two canister.
He smiled and whispered indulgently.
—She knows I’m with another woman. You watch yourself with the blokes, love. To some of them, handicaps mean nothing.
Kate had cause all at once to think of her burns as handicaps. It put them in a new light. There were kindnesses strangers did for you even with their misnomers.
—Handicaps? I can run. I can dance and even swim.
—Okay. Between now and Poet’s, you can have a good look at our metropolis, love. Should take you all of three minutes. They just closed the public baths last week for the winter. Should have left ’em till the northerlies started. Used ’em as an ice rink eh?
She found herself following him like a chatelaine to the top of the stairs. He took two steps down and then turned again.
—Connie’ll look after you, love. She’ll scare the buggers off.
The idea of Connie the virago seemed to tickle him. He laughed all the way to the bottom of the stairs.
Ten
SHE WANTED TO VERIFY that it was a three-minute town so she crossed the railway line again to examine things as laid out so cleverly and essentially.
Some things she was looking at for a second time, but now she had a room in town, the angle of inquiry was different. She found what she wanted. She found for example that the little Congregational church carried a fading pastel poster on its noticeboar
d: Myambagh is not Your Ambagh. It’s God’s Ambagh! She wanted to see, and found, the town baths with a drained pool, a high wire fence and a locked gate with the sign THE FLORENCE TRELOAR MEMORIAL POOL.
She wanted to see the other two-story pubs, the Royal and Tattersall’s, whose polarity on the south side of the line kept Murchison’s Railway Hotel in its place on the north. She wanted to see the standard war memorial, the putteed World War I digger, forearms folded on the butt of his bayonet-down rifle. She wanted to read the never before encountered and yet familiar names of those who had gone from Myambagh into a distant furnace: Ainsworth, Brady, Clarke, Dankworth, Egan, Flannery, Gordon, Gogarty, Harris, Ireton, Jenkins, Kelly, Lloyd, Mangan … Not expecting a second conflagration, the civic fathers of Myambagh had not left room for the new generation of dead in ’39–’45. Their names were crowded onto one remaining side: Lavery, McIntosh, MacMillan, O’Leary, Phillips.
The numbing, familiar names whose sacrifice served now, each one, as a little specific of two or three syllables to take the edge off Kate Gaffney’s dementia.
Near the War Memorial, a little metal sculpture of a merino sheep in honor of Horace Wrangle, native of Devon, Myambagh’s founding pastoralist.
On a corner the Bowling Club, such lovingly cared-for greens, such friendly knots of the middle-aged and the elderly in white flannels and skirts and cardigans. At the end of the greens, which had the even plushness of an untouched snooker table, a licensed clubhouse. Kate could see the barman from the street—he wore a little black bow tie on a muscular throat. Above him, the photograph of the Monarch, and the gold-leafed Roll of Honour which said who had won the mixed doubles in 1984.
One more corner along, the Returned Services League: Age shall not weary them. At its front desk, she could see, an elderly man was dozing. She could hear the metallic stammer of a poker machine within. The pokies, the bandits. The dispensers of small fortunes and manageable griefs, the devourers of addicted wives’ housekeeping. Age shall not weary them … Only in Kate’s nation, only in Australia and in every town, this nexus between one-armed-bandits and the holy memory of boys dead on the Kokoda Trail in 1942, in Flanders in 1917.
The high school: named after the lesser nineteenth-century explorer, discoverer of Myambagh’s fatal headwaters, which seem to flood the town on a cyclical basis, and the sighter of rare species of kingfishers. The Captain John Eglington High School. A knee-high thumb of granite stood by the fence. The Staff of the Captain John Eglington High School raised this monument in appreciation of the efforts of the students in restoring the buildings after the flood of 1986.
Beneath that the prosaic motto: Industry and Merit.
Anything more remarkable would have been a stab in the bowels, a hiatus of the breath.
Around the corner, the St. John Ambulance station had its door open, and a young, moon-eyed ambulance man sat in the vehicle, chattering into a radio without conviction. It looked to Kate as if the device was new to him, as if electronics of this sophistication weren’t his métier.
But she was not looking for clever countrymen.
All the doors of the shed marked Wrangle Shire Volunteer Bush Fire Brigade were properly shut. The memories of the incandescent bushfires of the past were held in place with a heavy lock.
She found herself turning in idly to the newsagents. She asked the woman who ran the cash register whether they stocked paperbacks.
—No, dear. We found there wasn’t the demand.
So ever more ideal, Myambagh, Wrangle Shire’s Venice, sang in her brain. Here there was a chance of being breathed in by the great antipodean stupefaction. She bought a copy of the Wrangle Shire Times, a photograph of three Rotary past presidents and their wives on its front page, and she walked out with its triviality wrapped under her arm, a sedative within reach. Who knew but that, before she got back to Murchison’s Railway Hotel, she might need to sustain herself by reading the scores of the Myambagh Central versus Wombilil A Grade cricket final?
There was an aged man, perhaps senile, on a bench outside Dunnegan’s Country Stores, who seemed to recognize her at once as a stranger.
—Have you seen our levees, dear?
—Levees?
—Flood levees, love. We’re famous for floods. The levees’re the most interesting thing in town. You ought to see the levees.
—I will. I’ll make sure of it.
—That’s the girl!
The bar when she returned was full of men in white overalls, or else with freshly scrubbed faces and combed hair, who may have recently emerged from overalls. They were the tradesmen brought in to repair the marks of the flood.
She closed herself in her room and sat on the bed.
There was a knocking on the door. Drum roll: Shave-and-a-haircut-two-bob knocking that wanted to show it didn’t have intent. Jack Murchison was there.
—Connie wants to know would you like a cup of tea?
He made two separate significant clenchings of his brows.
She recognized this as a command of unseen Connie’s. She followed the biddable Jack Murchison down the stairway and out along a verandah where the working rooms of the pub—the kitchen, the laundry, the meat-cutting room—were all located, their walls hedged in by the metal kegs waiting for collection. Kate entered the oven-warm kitchen in which Connie Murchison sat, feeding stewed pears to one of her two children who were just home from school. Jack Murchison’s wife was dark-eyed and with a dark and yet at the same time pale complexion. She was severely handsome. She had bruised, aggrieved eyes, a genetic grievance her parents had passed on to her. A bitterness due to the ancient behavior of the Turks or the Macedonians.
One child, a boy, large-boned like Jack, roamed the kitchen looking for something to put on bread. A mountainous woman was cooking steaks at an enormous fuel stove. Veal and langouste and angel-hair pasta had no place in the Railway Hotel dispensation. Here you gorged on steak and eggs and white bread. You perished early of a heart clogged by hefty protein.
The steak’s redolence was an omen for Kate and a navigational reminder. It told her she was on course to a tolerable end. Connie put her youngest child down and let it run out the door.
—You want a cup of tea?
—Yes.
She couldn’t prevent that silly involuntary flick of the head.
—Anything the matter? asked Connie with a new kind of suspicion. The tic soothed Connie’s moral concern but raised the possibility her new guest was epileptic.
Kate was aware that as she drank the tea, Connie watched her and held the discontented mouth in repose.
—We’ll have lots of men in for tea. Every night we’ve got lots of men. Jack says he really doesn’t think you know how many.
—I didn’t really know. I was looking for a quiet town. But I’ll see how this goes.
—Well, it’s a quiet town. Except the place is full of men. This is the way Myambagh goes: we have a flood every three years, and every time it happens, the politicians come in by helicopter and promise immediate help. So they fly in tradesmen, and pay them these special rates to paint and plaster before the damn place has even dried out. And then, a year or two later, when the town has dried out, they send them all back again, because by then the plaster has fallen off the walls, and the paint’s blistered. That’s why Shirley’s cooking all those steaks you see. For the men. You know.
Throughout her introduction Connie looked at Kate with cagey eyes. Again and quite frankly, the eyes of a woman who may not have seen the worst but certainly expected to.
—So you’re not really keen on the town being full of men?
Kate shook her head. In fact she was wondering whether she would leave, go west on the unused portion of her Bourke ticket. But it would mean giving up this exactly tailored town.
—I’m not a men sort of person.
Her eyes following her smaller boy child around the kitchen, Connie gave a snort of laughter. It sounded sisterly.
—God, that’s going to di
sappoint them.
Shirley the steak cooker laughed too.
Connie said, They really need women, those buggers. For about ten minutes a week.
Kate was emboldened now.
—I suppose I was brought in here to pass a test?
—Yeah, said Connie. Grievance came back to her face again, the sullenness which derived from before her birth. But as if to show that she had grounds for complaint in the present imperfection of things as well, she yelled, Hey, Jack! You called the distributor in Dubbo yet?
From the public bar Jack yelled, Soon darls! I’ve just got to broach a new keg first.
Eleven
APPROACHING POET’S DAY, Kate saw with some pleasure that her hair was getting raggier. In the spirit of this change, she maintained a savage air of separateness at dinner, and the men let her sit unmolested at her own table. The food was robust as you would expect, of vast quantity and bad for the heart. I will thicken, Kate promised herself, and my blood will thicken too to a kind of country glue. I will eat steak for breakfast. I will become a caution to the Australian Heart Foundation. I will swell their statistics for rural ill-health.
The table covers were plastic imitation lace punched out in Taiwan, and she was not worried about splashing steak juice across them as she ate her way toward becoming different.
She was aware of two types amongst the men who were painting and plastering the town.
There were some who clearly had an orderly life elsewhere. It marked the way they behaved here at the Railway Hotel, Myambagh. They’d come to a flood town to earn the good money available to those who mend disasters, and you could feel them holding themselves in against an unwise use of a dollar. They spent hardly anything in the bar. Their hair was brushed, they conversed quietly, their eyes did not jerk around the room and their elbows were tucked into their sides.
There was another breed: the escapees. Somewhere lay a city or a marriage they hated, and they were paying for taking false choices in the past. Their money would go to child maintenance or to some payment attended with high interest rates and potential loss.