A Woman of the Inner Sea (32 page)

The first vehicle to appear by the farmyard gate of the vanished Soldier Settler was Gus’s sister-in-law’s red ute, tinged a sallower red by its permanent dust.

Gus’s sister-in-law dismounted and opened the farmgate. By then Gus and Kate had reached the window. They were mystified: having opened the gate she backed away from it, did a complete U-turn and parked with the tail of the truck toward the farmhouse, leaving the track clear to the black sedan which had followed her to enter the yard.

Kate dwelt on the ecclesiastical black duco beyond the window.

—Uncle Frank? she asked. Uncle Frank?

She was still caught in the tail of something like a dream. Gus took no notice. He put his boots on without socks, in the manner of people of the old bush, the battling bush of the vanished Soldier Settler who wore socks only in the trenches of Flanders and for his wedding.

—It’s someone, Gus told her.

Barefooted still, she reached for her gumboots. She would have liked to have washed. This had nothing to do with the normal etiquette of visits however. Of what a visitor could expect in a farm wife, if that’s what Kate was. It had more to do with her delight in the image of a thread of cold water from the water tank by the front door. The white fabric had sharpened her delight in the seeing of such things.

She could hear the visitor’s car pull up by the steps. One look of alliance, and she and Gus went out to greet it. When they got to the verandah, Burnside was already out of the car, inspecting some knee-high native plant which had encroached on the shade of the verandah steps. He was no longer in the charity weeds they’d given him at the Palais in Myambagh after his rescue, but in his accustomed clothing—razorsharp slacks and a windcheater. He looked up as Kate emerged.

—Well, don’t you think you two ought to call the police and tell them you’re safe? They’d like to talk about what happened to the big fellow …

The big fellow. The biggest. Jelly.

Standing by her truck beyond the gate, Gus’s sister-in-law was waving something. It was an envelope. Burnside was the master of the envelopes.

—Fifteen thousand in cash, Gus. And a check for fifty thousand. All so that Mr. Burnside could have a talk to your friend. Legal documents. Fair enough in my book.

Gus’s face reddened. Perhaps even from that distance she could get that whiff of his shame, for she got uncertain and threw the envelope into her truck.

—Leave you to it for the time being.

She entered the truck herself, then she drove away homeward, dragging with her a light red squall of dust.

There was a makeshift table and two chairs on the verandah. Gus had set them there so that he and Kate had somewhere to sit and drink tea in the afternoons. Slowly in this landscape aching of slowness, Burnside set his eyes on this rough furniture.

—Can I come up? he asked as if he was very tired.

—No you bloody can’t, said Gus.

Burnside went back to his car, opened a door, then his briefcase which sat on a seat, and took a brown envelope from it. It was of course the twin to the one full of the papers Kate had signed in the
Railway Hotel. She felt an intimate anger. With a shudder, she felt it slither from her. She believed she could perceive it glittering handsome as Satan on the verandah boards.

She said, Now I’m not signing. I’m not signing now.

He did not realize that he was up against a living thing, where in Myambagh he had had to fight only inertia.

—If you’d signed them last time when I said, I wouldn’t be still after you.

—Get out of here. I’m not signing.

—So you only signed in Myambagh, said Burnside almost plaintively, with a thug’s genuinely hypnotic sense of grievance, because you knew the floods would get me. What a bitch of a thing. I can’t stand people who think like you do!

—Listen, you used to make me sick when you were on the
Vistula
, Mr. Burnside. Fuck off. I’m going inside.

—Well, you weren’t in such good taste yourself. You were all sewn up like a fucking Lebanese virgin. But we’re not here for insults. Mr. Kozinski senior is willing to pay you an extra $300,000 over the two million for your signature.

She heard Gus whistle or at least express breath despite himself.

—No. No way.

If the fury hadn’t broken from her body and made things simple, she could have said more rhetorical stuff than that. Something like: They haven’t printed the check large enough to carry the digits to pay for getting rid of me! As it was, she was so ruggedly angry she didn’t need to.

Burnside appealed to Gus. I don’t think she’s reasonable. Do you think she’s reasonable?

—Not for me to judge. But a sum like that … there’s got to be some dirty work.

—There’s dirty work, said Kate with her new passion. He’s the dirty work.

Gus put his head on the side. Light could be seen through his feathers of black hair. He said, I don’t know who invited you onto the property. I’ll have to speak to my sister-in-law.

Moved by his herbivorous curiosity, by habits well tolerated in his de-pouched babyhood by his friend Gus, Chifley had come in close.

Burnside mounted the stairs opening the envelope. He took papers out as he went, and offered them to Gus.

—You read them then. There’s a fee in them for you too. She already signed their identicals in Myambagh. What a town that is!

Stepping forward to receive the papers, Gus was at his most defenseless. She meant to tell him about Burnside’s renown, but Burnside was quicker than utterance. He dropped the papers on the verandah. They would not blow far in this still, dry air. With both hands he took Gus behind the neck and dragged his face down onto a raised knee. She heard Gus’s already skewed nose crack like a twig.

Omnipotent Gus who had led her out of the floods and rescued the beasts! Rescueless himself, he tumbled to the boards. Burnside’s knee then landed in her stomach, taking her breath, making her brain reach hugely for air.

Even without air Kate was abashed by the way Burnside spoke in cliché, not because he could not do better but because tough guys loved clichés, and Burnside wanted the tough-guy niche in the building industry of New South Wales.

—Don’t leave bruises on a lady, she heard him inform her. Work on the soft tissues. I’ve been bloody wanting to for some little time.

Her legs gone, she sat beside Gus. She could hear herself whooping for air. There came from between her legs a hateful brown stain; a stench of helpless resentment.

Burnside was collecting the Kozinskis’ papers again.
Now I will die rather than
, Kate was still airlessly saying.

What took up her mind while she barked for breath was a sort of admiration of the sister-in-law’s innocence. Here was a woman who certainly believed that money fell from heaven or—the same thing—came unsullied from the hands of scoundrels. If she hadn’t believed that, she would surely still be here, keeping an eye out for the way things went on the verandah. The eye, one of many, Burnside deserved to have focused on him.

He lifted her by the scruff, without effort, and somehow the movement gave her back her breath.

—What a great girl you are, Mrs. Kozinski! The
real
Kozinskis, particularly old Mr. and Mrs., despise you. You want to have kids by this fucking bushwhacker? I can neuter him, love! Listen: Sign Paul Kozinski’s papers so he can live the full enriched life he wants to, and you can live the shitty one you want.

Gus was trying to lever himself upright. Holding Kate still, Burnside kicked him casually in the side of the head. Had Burnside been wearing those heavy, metallic soles in Murchison’s Railway Hotel? How had she missed them?

At the thud of the impact, Gus’s arms flew from beneath him. Kate saw Chifley, a placid witness, ten paces from the base of the stairs. Menzies paced the fringes of the bush with an avian indifference, but Chifley
saw
and misread it all. He had the same brand of grass-eating innocence which Gus’s sister-in-law possessed. You push the gift of tongues upon us, thought Kate beyond reason, and now Burnside beats us to death with it.

Burnside said, I will fucking cripple your friend, and the lawyers Mr. Kozinski hires for me will tell the courts it was self-defense. They’ll even argue he was beating you. Your behavior will disqualify you as a witness. I’ve had cases like this before.

He sat in Gus’s chair. Shuffling the papers, he grew ruminative.

—This is an old road to me. It’s only new to you.

He watched her raise herself from the boards and flop into a chair. She wanted her breath back to tell him that the womb didn’t matter. For the fury was gone—it had its own will. Oh the weariness of his catching her up, and all the people who would be in his wake! But she had the resources to help Gus. Nothing to help Uncle Frank with. But she had the papers and, no doubt, Burn-side’s pen, to hand.

—I won’t sign for money. I’ll sign for nothing.

He produced his pen, set the reshuffled papers before her.

—The cover document says you have accepted an upfront and additional fee of $300,000, which I am authorized to write a check for. It’s up to you whether you cash the check or not. But I don’t want the legal problem of altering the documents.

She signed even that letter of agreement, and then started on the swath. There seemed to be even more companies than last time, not that she had ever taken definite notice. Some rang bells from the time in Myambagh, some she had not adverted to since Paul Kozinski’s courtship. Vistula Hotels Group Pty. Limited. Clean Cut Linen Service. Cracow Holdings Pty. Limited. Kozinski Residential of Western Australia. Kozinski Mineral Exploration Company Ltd. Kozinski Shopping Centres of California Pty. Limited.

These papers of resignation which might soon be matched by parallel letters of appointment. Papers waited in Sydney perhaps
to enable
La Belle
Krinkovich to take up the wealth and unconscious power Kate was relinquishing on a verandah at the bottom of the sea outside Bourke. They may already even have been signed. But their force depended on Kate signing these.

As she signed, Burnside grew philosophic.

—Look at that, he said. He laughed an unfeigned laugh. That bloody roo. Symbol of Australia. Small brain, enormous balls and all its muscles in its arse. Kept in the dark all its childhood and fed dairy products. Advance Australia Fair.

He rose and walked down the stairs with a swagger, his old Rugby jauntiness. The jauntiness too of course of a man feared without question on building sites.

He shaped up like a boxer to Chifley. As Gus had said, it is because of their pugilist posture that kangaroos had suffered this indignity for two hundred years or more, from the days of Georgian bare-fist fighting, imported on the same transports as the fly boys and girls of the East End. The first European ashore had wondered if the European soul could live here and if the flow of Christ’s blood had touched the place. The second European ashore, slackmouthed and a joker, had shaped up to the continent’s antique marsupial. Gidday, mate, want to fight?

The tradition of oafdom which had found its high-water mark in Burnside was about to take that old and hackneyed direction. Was about to box Chifley’s ear to punish him for his delicate forepaws and the appalling delicacy of the way he held them. Didn’t the bloody thing know what Burnside knew: that this was a tough bloody country.

Kate saw now with sweet foresight how Chifley would repay her for the tricky business of imposing tongues. Gus himself would have given out warnings on the subject, even to a man who’d broken his nose. But Gus was still gray-white and without bearings. Burnside had silenced his one possible warner.

In the opening passage of the contest, Chifley looked confused, flinching, leaning right back on the sturdy tail. Soon he would either flee or bring it all to a serious close. Burnside believed that what was needed was an increasingly stern approach. This supposition had made him a career. Old Mr. Kozinski and young Paul would pay him a quarter- or perhaps a half-million for smashing Gus’s face and exacting signatures and sparring with kangaroos.

Chifley leaned further back on the broad base of his tail. The great hind paws, partly raised, looked useless in this mode. You could see by the tension in the tail that it might be used at any moment to swing Chifley into sideways flight. All Chifley’s poundage and dynamics at the moment suggested bounding away. And in all her dreams he had never presented himself as a show boxer. Flight was his mode, and he was about to take it. Then even Burn-side would need a gun to catch him.

—You great fucking zoological joke, said Burnside, jabbing now, a sting to every jab. Chifley’s ears. Chifley’s shoulders and chest.

Burnside struck Chifley a straight, fearful blow, over the nose and between the eyes. And as the encyclopaedia she had read on her first night at Murchison’s Railway Hotel had foreshadowed, the beast’s hind paws, driven by the energy in the base of the tail, sped forward, fast as something thrown. Struck by these enormous paws in the abdomen and pelvis, Burnside folded up forward and sideways and struck the ground.

Now Chifley fled. He could tell that something had happened, though he wouldn’t have been able to define it from experience. He scudded past stiff-necked Menzies. For the first few halting bounds—the ones in which the forepaws were also involved—his hind paws left dark traces of blood on the ocher ground.

She went down the stairs and bent to Burnside. Chifley had torn the front of Burnside’s trousers and made a wound in the lower stomach.

Burnside said in a thin reverent voice, Mrs. Kozinski, my pelvis is gone.

In the shock of the damage done him, she had been restored in his mind to membership of the family.

—Oh Jesus, he admitted then, bloody silly thing to have done. Get a doctor, eh?

But he’d put himself beyond any usual, suburban mercies. In any case he gasped and seemed to go comatose. No more reflections or requests. She went back up onto the verandah and knelt by Gus. Gus, not certain where he was, but better in color. Regularly and with his eyes opened he would begin to snore without first going to sleep. She would get him a cool cloth soon.