A Woman of the Inner Sea (17 page)

—Get fucked! she told the man on the balcony.

—Nice bloody talk.

He spoke as if he took ardent comfort now from the fact he’d never held her.

T
HAT OR SOME OTHER NIGHT, an old friend of Jelly’s came into the bar. He was wiry, exactly like the whippet Guthega. But he had none of Guthega’s snide air. She admired the way he and Jelly greeted each other, not loudly, not wanting to impress the bar with their external mateship. He was a young enough man, perhaps close to forty, but olive-skinned and strangely leathered as if he had been that way since babyhood, or had even chosen to bear the accumulated leathering of his father and grandfather as well. Deep-set in the dark skin were glittering green eyes. He had a thatch of black hair which grew forward on his head like a hedge given a bias by the wind. He wore a gray sweater clogged with red dust, and carried an aged, big Akubra hat.

Jelly’s eyes softened as Kate approached him down the bar.

—Kate, Gus Schulberger. Protégé of mine. Played for New South Wales Country and I bloody hand-selected him myself.

Kate nodded at once and smiled and shook hands, a procedure Gus Schulberger seemed unfamiliar with.

—Gus comes from out near Bourke, Jelly said, as if that explained his unhandiness with the conventions.

Australians, so addicted to brave failure, spoke of the figure called the Battler, the man cheated by banks and seasons, hope withered by drought, drowned deep by flood, et cetera. Gus Schulberger could have played the Battler in any hard-luck documentary on television. For the Battler was required to have nothing left but a reflex grin and an upright posture, and Gus Schulberger had both. So that it was impossible to look at him now and imagine the young athlete, the twinkle toes, the sure fingers, the brushed hair, whom Jelly had selected for Country Firsts, who had run forth onto the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Both Gus and Jelly had been raised in any case in the bush tradition which expected early athleticism and energy to be shown up as a vain dream.

Jelly whispered to Kate.

—My friend Gus’s got outside in the back of his truck the bloody living Commonwealth of Australia coat of arms.

Kate frowned easily, knowing she was meant to. Jelly laughed at his Bundaberg rum before swallowing it, while Gus scratched his ear. Not
acting
rueful, as Guthega could. Rueful in fact and by nature. Jelly urged him.

—Give her a look, Gus.

Kate walked along the bar, past the Corner and then the Plaque men, the first of them angling for a glancing smile, and into the saloon. There Jack was talking to the accountant from one of the banks. Jack excused himself and stepped aside, and she asked him secretly could he mind the bar for a second?

With Jack’s permission she emerged on the clientele’s side of the bar, a matter of feet but a different continent. She saw that Jelly and Gus Schulberger were working it secretively too. Jelly pretended he needed to go out to the men’s to empty his calabash of a bladder. He had to be careful, for everyone watched him so jealously—the old men, Guthega, perhaps even Noel. Wary in case he cut them out of something, of some information they required for wholeness.

Gus stood bareheaded by a small furniture removal truck parked outside the saloon. He let out one plume of breath, bunched the corner of his mouth in regret, unlocked the bolt which kept the back door in place, and slid it upwards and open.

Kate flinched; that silly flick of the head overcame her. The block of dark inside the truck gave off a sudden animal rustling, a crinkling and resting of feathers, a click of paws, which made her step back. Her head returned to its normal, controlled position and she considered what had been presented. For a second she could believe that, pressed by hard times, Gus had brought with him something absurd and repellent to show to people in towns more populous even than this one, where he had stopped simply for a drink and for the sight of an old but sadly enlarged friend.

He pulled a torch from his pocket and shone it into the truck.

—Man feels a bit of a bloody traitor!

By the beam of light, Kate saw two animals standing on a bed of
straw. Their eyes picked up the beam of Gus’s torch and had for a second a weird, orange luminosity. Feather and fur. So tall that it was no wonder Gus had had to borrow this truck, made for transporting sideboards and hatstands. The bird was the taller. An emu. The kangaroo was not as lofty but was vast and muscular, and delicate in the face.

The emu, reassured by Gus’s musk or sight, folded its legs in a way which was the reverse of human legs and sat down all at once in its ball of body feathers. With that neck and small beaked head, it was still much higher seated than either of Connie Murchison’s children standing.

—These are the poor bloody beasts, Gus told Kate.

Addressing them, he adopted a voice of pleading.

—Okay, you blokes. No worries.

He turned down the beam of the torch.

—Wife raised both of them on our place. See that bird? Menzies. She raised it from the egg. Dogs got his father. The fathers do the nest-sitting with emus. Old feller put up a great fight, but the dogs get them in the legs and bring them down. I couldn’t call them off. They were right out of control, you know.

Kate was fascinated by the bird’s intense bulge-eyed stare. Incapable of flight, its eyes covered all angles of attack. The head seemed in fact half eyes, half beak; all caution and appetite. Feathered and wingless, it had long ago been played some trick.

—See the big gray roo? Chifley. Wife raised him too, from the pouch. Mother was hit by a truck. Wife fed it on a titty bottle. Used to be a station hand of my father’s in good times who tried to box poor bloody Chifley, you know square up to him, go two rounds. And my father said—and I agree with him—humans don’t have a tail, and roos don’t box. Do you Chif, eh? I hate boxing bloody kangaroos. Demeaning.

Gus’s green eyes took the kangaroo’s fixed gaze for a second but then turned away, sliding the torch beam away too.

—I saw an advert in the
Western Plains Gazette
—some bloke in Wagga is putting together this amusement park. He wants a roo and an emu, because at every stroke of the hour between nine and five, he’s going to put on what they call a
tableau vivant
of the Australian coat of arms. He’s got the Australian coat of arms standing there in the middle of his park. And he wants a tractable emu and a tractable roo who’ll come up on either side, just like on
the coins, right on the hour. He says he doesn’t worry if they’ll clear off afterwards. Just on the hour. All the families and school kids gathered. All the Japanese with their bloody cameras. They know it’s going to happen, and their cameras are all focused. The coat of arms in the middle. Chifley on one side. Menzies the miserable bloody emu on the other. If they stand still for two seconds I suppose everyone will clap. Then Menzies’ll clear off in his stiff-legged way. And Chifley will hop off, and I suppose that’ll make everyone applaud all the bloody more.

—This entrepreneurial bloke (Gus continued) tells me sensitive handlers will entice them up to the coat of arms with titbits.

He shook his leathery, black-plumed head. He didn’t like the arrangement anyhow.

—Different species with different attention spans. A mis-bloody-match. But no one gives a damn about that. Our founding fathers didn’t give a bugger. And our founding fathers jammed the emu and kangaroo together on the emblem.
And
set up the system we live under, Jelly. Sadly the system’s not adequate anymore to look after even one human being like myself living west of the Darling River. Poor bloody beasts.

His torch now switched off, he stared in the face at the darkness at the back of the van, that darkness in which you could feel the avian and marsupial long-suffering of the beasts.

—Well, said Jelly. You’ve got to make a living, Gus.

Jelly was shocked by his friend’s anguish, and so in a way was Kate. She could tell that inveighing against the founding fathers of the Commonwealth of Australia wasn’t Gus’s normal style.

—Not me, Kate couldn’t stop herself telling Gus, out of the blue, her head jerking. She wanted to be sure he knew she wasn’t even by remotest impulse connected with the systems of judgment which ruled all the breathing world. She had been judged herself. Her license to be glib had been torn away from her.

Now she could see more closely into the interior of the truck—her eyes had got used to the dark, wide street beside the dark, wide railway. Past the avian skinniness of the hunched-down emu, she saw at a stroke the princeliness of the kangaroo. She was aware of the limpid eyes, though she could not actually see them reflect light. She had the evidence of muscular shoulders, of the brawny solidity of the lower limbs, the great hammer of a tail. A potent beast to be a cropper of grass, to be one with the sheep and the
deer, to share no impulse with the lion. Through no animal chain had Chifley ever consumed his own kind. Yet he had a power which came from more than grass.

—We raised them like children, Gus said. And now we sell them. Or I bloody do.

Jelly wanted to salve the hour.

—That’s the nature of business, old son, said Jelly, who knew nothing about the nature of business.

—
Tableau vivant
, said Gus. I told the Dubbo people no boxing for Chifley and nothing but the best treatment. I got the owner to sign a letter … And no bloody digger hats on the emu either.

The angular bird stirred and turned its head. It was vigilant, even in the limited darkness of a furniture truck. But the kangaroo called Chifley stayed immobile, fixed on Kate.

Kate said, Chifley.

—My wife’s joke. Rest her.

—Bloody good woman, Jelly said hurriedly.

—Sadly missed I tell you, said Gus.

The emu gave a guttural moan, and the great muscular grass-eater, plague of graziers but friend of Gus’s, seemed to join with him in reflection and fond memory.

Jelly spent more time on the question of the late Mrs. Schulberger, now that it had been raised by Gus.

—I was really surprised, Gus. I heard she had that problem …

—Yeah. Coccyx, Jelly. The cancer ate her up. It was a mercy when.

Jelly’s voice took on a sort of liquid condolence.

—Guthega comes one day and tells me she’s passed on. I mean, I had a get-well card all ready to post.

—Went quickly, said Gus, smoothing down the back of his wiry black hair.

In the truck Chifley seemed still to wait for further, more cogent news of where the hand which had raised him had gone. The bird Menzies bent down from his sitting position and picked up a feed pellet from the floor. He raised his narrow head on its enormous neck and stared and swallowed. If he had not been going off to dubious employment, Jelly and Kate would have laughed at the way he dispatched the pellet down the long tube of his neck.

Jelly nodded toward the kangaroo.

—Look at the balls on that big bugger.

But Gus was still reconciling himself.

—
Tableau
bloody
vivant
. It’s supposed to be a flash park. There’ll be a resident vet.

—Better than he’d get here, Jelly murmured. The cockies’d blow the shit out of him.

—Chifley, said Kate.

Something had been evoked in the stone behind her ribs. Some minor creak of wonderment.

Gus slid the door down as Kate waited oblivious of the bar inside. She kept a staunch sense of the presence of Chifley even while the door was still a hand span open, jammed for the second, demanding from Gus the deepest sigh of all and a more emphatic pressure of the hand.

She told Jelly she needed a quiet night and would not go home with him that night. He was easy about that.

—Need a bloody rest myself, love, he said, rolling his eyes in a way which did both of them the compliment of pretending they were insatiable.

In her sleep, a sleek marsupial pride uncoiled from her. She understood asleep that this was a joy she was not capable of awake. She made forward, bounding progress over a saltbush plain. There was an ecstasy in her pace, in the astounding assembly of limbs she had some sweet connection with. She found herself waking in the night with the first yelps of idiot laughter on her lips. They died at once, of course. Sucked up by the firmaments which hung above Myambagh.

A town in a plain, by a treacherous river, Myambagh was too massively lost in space to permit people to sit up in beds in wooden houses. Laughing aloud at nameless hours of the night.

But she knew her pleasure was significant.

S
HE DID NOT AT FIRST recognize Burnside as the Kozinski retainer that he was. He had grown a sandy mustache which he hadn’t had in the old days, when Paul used to bring him aboard the
Vistula
for reasons which were part of Kozinski Constructions’ secret history. His belly had got looser too, but he still had his enormous shoulders—a weight lifter from before the time of the Nautilus machine.

In the bar he had taken off his suitcoat and his tie. The tie was folded into the top pocket of his striped shirt—all to falsely signify to the small crowd in the bar that he was just a drinker, that he had no other intentions.

Kate accepted him as a visiting salesman, but then identified him in a rush. Her flick of the head had diminished under the influence of the bounding dream, but it came back wildly now. She considered leaving quietly and finding Jack. But she went on stacking schooner glasses and answered the raised hand of a drinker at the far end of the bar, the man in Jelly’s corner, which was available for casual drinkers to flex their souls in by day.

She cherished, in a fashion, the way men raised their hands like that, never certain that anyone would take notice. Each hand raising a tentative claim on the universe. And once they knew you’d seen them, they pointed downward into the residual froth of their friend’s empty glass and then of their own. Who taught them to do that? Would Bernard have done that, in the end? And all without knowing where it came from?