A Woman of the Inner Sea (15 page)

It was getting complex. So she decided to be forceful.

—Look, do you want me to bloody well work here or not, Jack?

He was not good at the anger of women. He was frightened by it.

—Okay, okay. I think you’re great at this, Kate.

He tapped one of the beer taps, the Toohey’s New.

—Do you have a husband somewhere or something?

—I left him.

She wondered was there somewhere she could go where men, and the question of men, were not as omnipresent and would not so clearly arise. She could not think however of such a location.

—Okay, Kate. Try it if you want. What about from one o’clock in the afternoon till eleven at night? You’ve got to have a life to yourself, Kate.

He seemed to understand that this easy
You’ve got to have a life
enraged her, but he couldn’t see why.

—You
will
be nice to the customers, Kate, won’t you?

She knew how to answer that. The precisely effective words.

—Go to buggery!

She still could not stop her head from jerking. She was as disappointed as that: he’d said it was adequate to pour the perfect beer and not have spillage through the drip tray but it seemed that he needed to know other things as well. Jack approached these other things by talk of his wife.

—Listen, I’ve noticed a few similarities with you and the wife. Let me tell you … Connie gets depressed. But her sister was a great depressive. You see, she cut her own throat in a café the family owns at Goondiwindi. Closing time, about nine-thirty at night. She shuts the doors, goes to the sink behind the bloody counter and just cuts through her carotid, here.

He touched the corner of his neck. She could tell from the tender way he did it that his own carotid would always be safe from any violence at his hands. She found him lovely therefore in his completeness, in his beer flab and his weakness, in his height and his dark complexion and his small farting noises of appeasement.

—I don’t want any emotional troubles around here. I’ve got my hands full looking after Connie. See?

He saw it as his task to keep Connie from handling a knife with intent.

Kate decided to laugh. He could be got at by laughter.

—So first I have to convince you I’m not a whore, and now I have to convince you I won’t kill Jelly in the public bar.

He laughed at that. He was pitiably relieved at her joke.

—Sounds silly when you put it like that, he conceded.

—Of course it’s fucking silly.

—Better not use that word in the bar, Kate. These blokes are pretty simple-minded. They presume any woman who uses that word is all in favor of it.

That night, without being asked, she poured a Bundaberg rum and put it in front of the pyramid, Jelly. It was his standard drink. Thoughtfully, he drank a quarter of a bottle a night. Sticky distillation of the sun, and of Queensland sugarcane. Overproof.

—What’s this about you and dynamite?

She knew that Jack was listening in, though pretending to speak to someone down the bar. Jelly had, set amidst the jowls of his lower face, a well-formed set of honest features, and he could not stop them flushing with a sort of gratification, could not prevent the glitter in his green eyes.

He said, You do something once in a country town and you cop the name for life. People talk as if it’s the only thing you ever done. I haven’t touched bloody gelignite for years. Pardon the language, love. We’re a rough pack of bastards in here.

Jack intervened, chin held high. He had to endow Jelly with a seriousness Jelly was not permitted to endow himself with.

—Be honest with the lady, eh. You got a bloody shedful of the stuff in the backyard. Maybe you’d better have a look at it, Jelly. See if it’s bloody sweating.

—I’ve got nothing in the backyard, Kate, Jelly told her, looking up from under his eyebrows. I don’t even mow the bloody backyard. Not since my wife went home to her mother. No dynamite in the backyard. No bloody dynamite in the bedroom either.

But he was just saying it to make Guthega and Jack laugh. He wasn’t using it as a lever, though other men laughed as much as if it were.

—But you were a dynamiter once?

—Listen, love, I’m a pensioner. I live on bugger-all. Used to be a fancied footballer and country selector. Used to work on the railways once too.

Guthega laughed at this claim of having worked.

—Bloody nifty-fingered in the goods yard.

—Go to buggery, said Jelly to Guthega, and turned again to Kate.

—I did some dynamiting in the ’62 flood. That’s true.

Seemingly rehearsed, Jack had already fetched pencil and paper and now delivered it to Jelly. Jelly took both as if he expected them, as if the two of them had taken other wanderers through this tale.

Jelly drew a diamond-shaped parallelogram.

One side, he said, was the western highway named Eglington. Two others were the levee banks. The fourth side, the one closest to his right hand, was the branch railway, the Myambagh–Cobar line. The road was a natural levee, as was the railway. The two lines of citizen-made levees were on the lower ground and faced the direction the water usually came from when the whole western river system flooded. The levees completed the walls of fortress Myambagh, said Jelly. They were too low, though the Shire President McHugh said they were high enough. Everyone knew they’d have to be reinforced in floodtime with sandbags.

Within the diamond the Bourke–Sydney railway (by which Kate had arrived in town) traveled on low ground through the center of Myambagh, but it was not for the moment germane to what Jelly was telling Kate. Out of the picture, near where the Cobar spur—which was germane—broke away, it crossed the Wrangle and went off seeking other towns.

—I was a footballer in those days, prop for Western Districts. Bloody sight skinnier than I am now. Full of confidence, stupid as a rabbit. But I knew enough physics to see there weren’t aqueducts under the railway to take floodwater off once it breached the levees. A man didn’t need to be Einstein!

He passed the map on to Kate for her full study.

—A wall of water came in from the east, across the flats from the Bogan. As it’s been doing at least since the Stone Age. And we were all working on the levees, piling up sandbags like the bloody Egyptians, but the thing broke under the force of the flood. And everyone was dithering about the railway line—the cops said one thing, and the Shire President something else.

—Old McHugh, said Guthega. Absolutely useless.

Noel gurgled. It was filial assent.

—So two other blokes and I broke into the dynamite store at the railway—gelignite, detonators—took it all out to the Cobar line. And we blew a great hole in the embankment.

He lowered his voice and sipped his rum, and then said in a
rum-aspirated voice, Before we did it, the water was already to the bloody roof trees. Now it emptied away west. People say the jelly bloody saved the town.

—Bloody did, said Guthega.

Bloody did
. The Australasian
Amen
.

Guthega turned to Noel.

—You reckon you got enough go in you to do something that size?

—I don’t know, said Noel.

—I bloody do. Your moral fiber’s got sapped by the bloody wide comb …

Noel looked away. Guthega often niggled him in the long purgatory of his dutiful nights. A champion without credit. Always invoked, always backhandedly praised to strangers, but always devalued.

—No wonder he likes the bloody scabby wide comb, said his father, nasty with booze. Fucking terrified of spiders. Wouldn’t clean a fucking dead mouse out of the kitchen for his mother. Did it out of shame in the end. But you should’ve seen him trembling …

He imitated craven trembling, and only the Plaqueman laughed.

Noel had gone pale. He walked out of the bar to stop himself hitting his father.

—Jesus, Guthega, said Jack. You ought to be kinder to that boy. He’s a credit to you and all you do is tear him bloody down.

—Go and apologize and tell him to come back in, Jelly instructed Guthega.

—He’s entitled to come in on his own steam. If he’s too thin-skinned …

But under the joint pressure of Jack and Jelly he was forced to rise and go to the door. Noel was waiting out there in the night, looking at the road and the peppercorns and the glint of railway lines.

—Okay son, said Guthega. Don’t take it hard. Come in and have a drink with your old man.

Noel came in but with a set face. It was probably the truth that he had a phobia of small and creeping things. Otherwise he could not have looked so betrayed.

—Listen, said Guthega, turning to anecdote to make everyone
forget his meanness. Did I tell you about this big feller from Coonabarabran … ?

—Hang on, Jelly told Guthega. We’re still on the dynamite. Who’s strangling this bloody cat?

In near-silence the Plaqueman tittered once, and Jelly went on.

—Then, last time, ’86, I should of done it, but I didn’t. See, I was away with the footballers in Wagga. My mates from ’62 … one had passed away and the other’d moved to North Queensland. There weren’t any bloody young bulls left in town to blow the line.

Guthega said, Those emergency services blokes wouldn’t know you were up ’em till you coughed.

He winked at his son.

—Well, next time, said Jelly evenly. Next time, I’m going to take no bloody notice of them at all, and I’ll just do it again. Bloody useless line anyhow. Blow the shit out of it. Pardon the French, Kate.

Concluding, he conceded with a nod that she should keep his little map. His mouth looked delicate now. Myambagh’s flood history and his past missed chances made him wistful. Childlike. Someone’s lost darling boy. He and Jack had, she thought for an instant, been cruelly teamed
because
they were willing and expectant children.

Jelly sank the residue of his rum and, deadly white around the mouth from resolve, looked Kate in the eye.

—Are you going to let me buy you a drink, love?

All watched. She put her hand to her throat and hitched her chin. Ironic consent. She pulled up one of the schooner glasses from the tray. Even the whippet—Guthega—knew for the time being not to be snide. She knew anxious Jack weighed what was happening. He knew it all had a kind of unruly impetus.

She flicked one of the taps.

—A schooner of New, she announced to Jelly.

After the first pour had settled, she finished the big glass off smoothly; an exceptional job. Kate would have liked a vodka, but that wouldn’t have thickened her adequately. She raised the schooner to her lips.

—Cheers, Jelly. Thanks.

Jelly picked up his Bundaberg rum, and before taking a sip, he said so that only she could hear, Jesus!

He meant that he didn’t know what it meant, her accepting a drink. It had a kind of binding quality just the same.

When she had emptied a third of the glass, she put it down for a rest and put her hand out so that he could pay her.

A
ND SO TO PROVE her usualness to the Murchisons and the Monks and the Escapees, Kate took Jelly as her protector and her associate. No one need ask her a further question now. The burden of her suspicious soleness was borne away. Neither could Jack and Connie be too surprised at her submission, since it had not been sudden or flippant or casual, and was directed at a person of eminent worth. Secure, she listened to the conversations at the bar, to the tales of average profanity, to the numbingly plain opinions.

And Kate was salved by the utter indistinction of every word.

She listened to this gracious static all day. Barely had she time to eat her enormous breakfast, to excrete, to stun herself with some article from
Woman’s Day
, and she was in the bar, claimed—for the remaining twelve hours of her daily energy—by the two-flick action of perfect pouring. Jelly arrived at six, drank a rum and ate a steak sandwich, and stayed on in his presidential corner.

The acres of newsprint in which she wrapped the morning eggshells, steak fat and potato peelings, remained as plain as the bar talk. Yet one morning when Shirley the cook’s breath smoked as she entered from the brisk air outside, Kate’s eye hooked on another headline, radiant with meaning even here in Myambagh.

Not so much poor Uncle Frank, she thought. Poor Kate O’Brien-Gaffney. Frank would be buffered by his champions: Mrs. Prendergast, Mrs. Kearney, Mr. O’Toole, and a network of hundreds. Kate O’Brien would be his loneliest defender.

At once Kate knew that Uncle Frank did not need his niece to come out of mid-transformation to defend him in any case, even if she had resources to offer him. He must understand her purpose, and must know others would stand up for him by the busload. Remarkable that O’Toole, dependent for business on the Catholic community, as venal a man as any other, would chastise Cardinal Fogarty in Uncle Frank’s divine name.