Perhaps this was why Mick had to sweep the veranda every morning, water the orange tree, and then settle down for an hour or two at the big table to do some schoolwork, because that was what was done in the old days. Today Mick had had to trace a map of the world onto a sheet of foolscap, and colour in the countries, and then work out a horrible problem which was to do with how long it would take to fill up a bath that was simultaneously being emptied at a different rate.
But now he was free. He stopped and tried to talk to Willy, but the horse was in a mad mood again, and reared up, baring his teeth at him. ‘I don’t care what you think,’ said Mick. ‘We’re going to be friends.’
He went to the top of the mound and detected fresh roo droppings. Then he searched for a particularly noisy cricket that seemed to have set up a sawmill in the rocks, but he couldn’t find it. What he particularly wanted to find one day was a dingo skull.
He sat on a rock and looked back down at the homestead. He hadn’t explored properly, but he knew the layout already. There was a lovely, white-barked, snappy gum tree in the yard that gave shade to the veranda, and a poinciana tree. There was a large workshop for making and mending, with a big generator behind it in its own stone hut, with three diesel drums up against the wall of it in the shade of the southern side, where they wouldn’t get baked by the sun. It was said that fuel barrels could explode in high summer, and send a great ball of fire into the sky.
There was a row of self-contained huts that his granpa said were the same as the ones that Hamersley Iron built for their miners, and this was where the single men had their accommodation. There was a washhouse and a cookhouse, and a tall shiny water tower made of galvanised steel, with a wind pump on a gantry for filling it with water from the boreholes and the cisterns. Granpa was proud of his cisterns. They collected what little rain there was from the roofs. Sometimes, though, when there was a cyclone, the cisterns filled up to overflowing in seconds. ‘Why do you have to have a tower, Granpa?’ asked Mick. ‘Why can’t you just pump it when you need it?’
‘Pressure,’ answered Granpa, without further explanation, leaving Mick unenlightened. On the roof of the bungalow was a large shiny tank that soaked up the sunshine and made enough hot water on its own not to need a boiler. ‘Got the idea from a Gyppo,’ said Granpa, also without further explanation.
In the near distance Mick could see a small convoy of vehicles, consisting of two motorcycles, a ute, and a bull catcher, approaching the homestead. Behind them they raised a pall of rich red dust. For some reason the sight made him think of his mother, all confused and full of tranquillisers, and he felt a pang of sorrow and homesickness. He was in a male society now, and it was as if the softness in his life had disappeared. Still, it would be fun as well as frightening to be out among these rough-and-ready people. Granpa had promised that he would teach him to ride a horse, and handle the mobs, and then he could go home one day and say with some truth, ‘I used to be a jackaroo,’ something he could be proud of all his life.
Mick went looking for snakes. He had in his hand Granpa’s handbook of Western Australian wildlife, and had mugged up on what was dangerous and what was not. He thought the ideal thing to see first would be a spinifex snake, because they didn’t usually kill you. Granpa said, ‘Don’t bother them and they don’t bother you. That’s the rule.’ Granpa had a rhyme that he made Mick learn. It went:
You see a snake, you step away,
You tip your hat and say Good Day,
Pleased to meet you, how d’you do?
I’m sorry for disturbing you.
Mick was looking forward to finding a snake to recite it to, but soon the day became too hot and bright, and he lost heart. He came back over the mound, and it was then that he noticed a picture on one of the big slabs of rocks. It had been scratched into the surface, so that it showed white against the buff-coloured rock. It was a snake. Someone had drawn a very good picture of a snake, but they had scraped it instead of painting it. Mick felt there was no point in reciting his rhyme to it.
He found his grandfather spiking some bills at his desk, and said, ‘Granpa, I just saw something.’
‘Did you now? Sure you had your eyes open?’
‘Someone’s scraped a picture of a snake onto a rock, over there, on the mound.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s a petroglyph.’
Mick looked confused, so Granpa repeated, ‘A petroglyph. There’s thousands of them everywhere if you look hard enough. It’s the blackfellas, they’ve been at it for thousands of years. No idea how old that one is. Just keep your eyes peeled.’
‘Why did they do it, Granpa?’
‘I was taking a shufty at your schoolbook just now, Mick. You’ve drawn a dog on the back. Why d’you do that?’
‘I felt like it, Granpa.’
Granpa shrugged. ‘Well, maybe the blackfellas felt like it.’
‘Do they still do it?’
‘Dunno, son. Whyn’t you go and ask? Pop over to Gurarala. And don’t draw on your schoolbooks. Not allowed. I’ve got cartridge paper if you want it.’
‘Sorry, Granpa. Granpa?’
‘Yes, son?’
‘It’s my birthday tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, I know. You’re going to be twelve.’
‘D’you think that Mum will phone?’
‘I’m sorry, son. I honestly think she won’t. Too far gone.’
‘Granpa?’
‘Yes, son?’
‘Can we talk about Dad?’
Granpa sighed. ‘It’ll only upset you. Better not.’
‘Granpa, please.’ The pleading expression on Mick’s face was hard to resist, so Granpa had to give in reluctantly.
‘Well, after supper. We’ll have a yabber then. I’ve got work to do, and I don’t want to get myself upset. Or you. How d’you like it, being a sandgroper? All right so far?’
‘It’s hot.’
‘Gets much hotter than this. All right, apart from that?’
‘Yes, Granpa, but what about Mum?’
‘You’ve just got to wait, son. I’m your mum and dad now, till you get your mum back. Make the most of it. One day you’ll be back in Sydney with the cockroaches, and this’ll all be gone.’
That evening Jimmy Umbrella, the Chinese cook, fried up a big lump of meat, with a heap of tomatoes cut in half and done in the same fat. Mick was getting used to the big portions of meat, and managed a bit more at every meal. Granpa would say, ‘Eat muscle and it makes muscle,’ and if Mick left any on his plate, Granpa would help him out and wolf it down. Mick couldn’t take the damper bread, though, and Granpa would say, ‘Don’t blame you, son, it’s daggy stuff,’ and wolf that down too. Granpa liked it best when it was fried so that it turned into a puftaloon, instead of being a solid lump.
‘Is this corned beef?’ asked Mick. ‘It’s really nice.’
‘No, it’s a dugong. Got run down by a boat. Seemed a shame to waste it, so I bought some of it, and Jimmy cut it up for the freezer.’
‘Dugong?’
‘The original mermaid, son.’
‘We’re eating a mermaid, Granpa?’ Mick was both puzzled and shocked, and suddenly the meat didn’t taste so good.
‘Not the pretty kind that sit on a rock in fairy tales. It’s like a bloody great seal. It’s bush tucker, son, except it’s not from the bush, it’s from the briny.’
After supper Granpa took Mick out onto the veranda so that they could sit side by side in the darkness, and then it would be easier to talk. Granpa fetched two stubbies and put them beside his chair. He opened one of them, and it hissed.
‘You wanted to talk about your old man,’ said Granpa.
‘Nobody’s told me anything,’ said Mick.
‘Look, nobody knew how to tell you, so they ducked out of it.’
‘How to tell me what, Granpa?’
‘How he died. Why it happened. I expect that’s what you want to know.’ Granpa paused, and said, ‘You know your dad was a policeman?’
?
??Yes.’
‘Well, he was a special kind of policeman. More like a soldier, if you think about it. He went out and dealt with the real scumbags. Drongos with guns. He copped it in the line of duty, son.’
‘Dad was shot?’
‘Three times. Didn’t stand a chance.’
Mick didn’t know what to say.
‘I’m sorry they never told you how your dad went down. I told them they should. Your mum should have, but she couldn’t cope. Anyway, your dad’s a bloody hero, son. He was trying to get to a wounded mate, out in the open. You should be proud. Like I am. If I had to lose a son, that’s the way I’d choose.’
He was struggling to speak, and Mick could see his grandfather’s eyes glowing in the dark. Mick stood up and went and put his arm around his grandfather’s neck, and Granpa put his arm around Mick’s waist.
‘Let’s not talk,’ said Granpa, but then he said, ‘Losing your mum or your dad is bad enough, mate, but losing one of your kids is even worse. I’ve tried them both. And I want to tell you something about your mum.’
‘My mum?’
‘Yeah. Don’t give up on her. She’s a lovely girl. When your dad brought her here for the first time, we all loved her. Always laughing, always singing, always helping. Terrible soft spot for the animals. We had a sick steer that broke its leg in a fence, and she cried over it. She’s sensitive. That’s why she couldn’t cope with what happened to your dad. Don’t let anyone tell you she’s a loony. She’s just broken, and needs mending.’
That night Mick lay awake listening to the grasshoppers outside, and the distant lamentation of a dingo. He’d been bitten by sandflies that day, and was itching all over. It had never really occurred to him that his dad had been Granpa’s little boy, the same way that he’d been his own father’s little boy.
When he finally fell asleep he dreamed about the bunyips, and blackfellas scraping pictures on the rocks, and about his dad, out in the urban jungle, having gunfights with scumbags.
MICK’S PRESENT
ON HIS TWELFTH birthday, Mick wanted nothing more than a phone call from his mother, but he knew it wasn’t going to happen. Granpa said she’d gone bush, was still sedated, and hadn’t come back from Fairyland.
He got up early, and went for a walk, because first light is a great time in the Pilbara. He visited the little black pigs in their pen, and snorted at them in reply to their demands for a meal. He knew that Jimmy Umbrella would be along with a bucket later, with the leavings from the kitchen, and later on he’d be back with another bucket to collect the droppings for the vegetable patch.
Mick was accompanied by the cat, a fluffy blue Persian of a variety that you often found round there back then, because somebody in Millstream was breeding them. They weren’t practical cats for that kind of heat, but there’s nothing a cat likes more than lying around getting too hot. This cat was called Lamington, after the cake, which looked nothing like him at all, because the cake had chocolate on top, with desiccated coconut. Lamington got on well with Mick, and followed him around, winding himself round his legs, and miaowing hoarsely.
Mick was walking out to the corral to visit the mad horse, when he heard a terrible racket being set up in the chicken pen, the sound of panic and mayhem, a cacophony of clucking and squawking. His first thought was that it was a fox, because foxes had somehow found their way across the middle of Australia, all the way from Queensland, in the previous century, and continued to be a pest.
It wasn’t a fox, however, it was a very large lizard, whose length was about the height of a man, and in its jaws was a brown chook that it was beating against the ground. It threw the bird violently to the earth, picked it up, and then threw it again.
Lamington bared his teeth and spat. He had met one of these before, and knew to stay out of the reach of its tail. His back arched, and his fur bushed out so that he looked like a big spitting ball of blue fluff.
Mick had not met a lizard like this before, and his first thought was that it must be a crocodile, except that it obviously wasn’t. He could have run away, but his instinct was to save the chook, so he grabbed a rake that was leaning up against the fence, and took a swipe at the lizard. It dropped the chook and looked at him with its big liquid eyes, its forked tongue flicking in and out of its mouth. Its throat seemed to inflate as if it had swallowed a cricket ball, and it hissed at him defiantly. It was a handsome beast with beautiful markings that looked very like some Aboriginal patterns that Mick had seen out on the rocks.
There was a moment of stand-off, and then Mick whacked it on the head with the rake, whereupon, with lightning speed, it whipped its tail round and lashed Mick across his legs. It hurt so much that he almost couldn’t feel it, and in the second before the pain kicked in, he whacked the lizard again. It went up on hind legs, and ran away so fast that Mick could not believe his eyes. It was faster than any animal he had ever seen before, and a great deal faster than he could ever have hoped to run himself. A hundred yards away it stopped, and reared up on its tail to watch him for a moment before resuming its extraordinary sprint.
Mick stood there with tears gathering in his eyes as the stinging of the lash intensified into what felt like a burn. He blinked, not daring to look down at what the lizard had done to him.
Granpa came hurrying out of the house and said, ‘Well, you’re a fair dinkum chip off the old block, son. Just like your dad. Never backed off from a blue.’
Granpa bent down and looked at the stripe across Mick’s legs. ‘You’re going to have a big welt across there, son. It’ll be a blue, black and green one, with a red one down the middle, and yellow bits for decoration. Those things can break a dog’s leg.’
Mick did not want to say anything because he knew that if he did, he would cry, and he wanted to be a real man in front of his grandfather. He didn’t want to move or walk because he knew it would make the pain even worse.
‘That was a perentie, in case you were wondering,’ said Granpa. ‘Pity you didn’t kill it, they’re pretty tasty. The blackfellas love ’em.’ He went over and picked up the chook. ‘This one’s a goner,’ he said. ‘Those things have a poison bite. Better put it out of its misery. Can’t even give it to the dogs.’
Mick didn’t watch as his grandfather dealt with the dying chicken. ‘I think it’s going to hurt too much to walk, Granpa,’ he said.
‘You’re gonna have to, son; you’ve got to come and see your birthday present. Happy birthday, by the way. Many happy returns.’
Mick began to walk against the pain and the stinging, and followed his grandfather very slowly. They went round past the dunny house, and into one of the sheds. There was something covered with a dusty tarpaulin, and Mick knew straight away what it was, because the silhouette it made was unmistakable.
Granpa swept the tarpaulin off, to reveal a motorcycle.
Mick couldn’t believe his eyes. He was much too young to have a motorcycle. It wasn’t something he’d even got around to aspiring to. It was even way beyond an air rifle. ‘Blimey, Granpa,’ was all he could say.
‘Don’t get too excited,’ said Granpa. ‘This is a model 44 Francis-Barnett. It’s thirty years old at the least, and it used to belong to your dad. It’s got a Blackburne engine, and it’s a four-stroke, and it works on a magneto so you don’t need a battery. I thought you’d like it, even if it doesn’t work. Not that I know if it works or not.’
‘How’m I going to get it to work, Granpa?’
‘One of the blackfellas. He’s a dab hand. You’re gonna take it to bits and put it back together again, because that’s how you make an old machine get going, and after you’ve done that you’ll know everything you’ll ever need to know about how it works and how to mend it when it conks out in the middle of nowhere.’
Mick looked at the ancient motorcycle. It had a dilapidated single seat, with the stuffing coming out, and a pannier on the back. The tyres were perished and cracked all round the walls. It didn’t look as if it would ever go again.
‘She’ll be right,’ said Granpa, as if he could read his grandson’s mind, ‘I’ve ordered new tyres from Perth. How’s that welt coming along?’
Mick looked down at his legs. ‘It’s bruising up,’ he said.
‘It’s gonna hurt like hell for days,’ said Granpa. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be getting on that bike to try it for size, then.’
As they walked back past the dunny, Mick asked, ‘Granpa, what does that rhyme mean? The one in the dunny.’
‘What rhyme?’
‘The one on the wall. It says, “Don’t you sit upon this seat, the bloody crabs can jump six feet.”’
‘Damn, I forgot that was there. I’ve seen it so many times I’ve stopped seeing it.’
‘But what does it mean, Granpa? I’ve looked and there aren’t any crabs, and they live in the sea anyway. Why would there be crabs in the dunny?’
‘No idea,’ said Granpa.
That night Mick sat at the table with his grandfather, waiting for Jimmy Umbrella to bring in his special birthday dinner. He had before him a wooden board, a small hammer, a fork and a pair of stout scissors. Granpa had the same equipment, and two longnecks in front of him.
‘I’m sorry your mum didn’t ring,’ said Granpa. ‘I hope you had a good birthday anyway. Apart from being whipped by the lizard.’
‘Will Mum ever be better?’
‘No one can tell, son. We’ve just got to wait. But I’ll tell you one thing. Half of me hopes she won’t, because if she does, you’ll be leaving. This is like having another go at bringing up your dad. Glory days.’
Mick was pondering this, when Jimmy Umbrella came in triumphantly bearing a huge bowl containing a confusion of bright red creatures that looked as exotic and wondrous as anything from Mars. ‘Here’s him,’ said Jimmy, as he put the bowl down on the table.