Autumn Laing (44 page)

She woke and knew she had slept deeply for many hours. When she stepped under the shower the water chilled her and she yelped and danced around on the wet concrete. Glossy green ceramic frogs clustered like the bloated fruit of darkness against the struts of the ceiling until the cool of nightfall, when they fell, their ripe bodies slapping onto the wet concrete pad with a little self-satisfied clap of approval. In the morning they were up there, sucked in tight against the roof beams and each other again, smugly defying gravity through the heat of the day. Barnaby’s mother, Margery, told her carpet snakes sometimes
climbed up and devoured them. ‘Don’t worry, dear. The carpet snakes are not poisonous and won’t bother you.’

Pat lifted her notebook and shook it. It might have been a Bible and he a preacher about to quote some judgment at her. ‘Yeah, I thought this too,’ he said, and he looked at her. ‘Not with this clarity that you’ve got here. But I was interested. I didn’t see it as fully as this.’ He set the book on the grass beside him and looked at it. Then he looked up at her. ‘You don’t have to convince me.’

She waited, wondering if he would deny wanting to be rid of her. But he said nothing. He flicked his cigarette into the stream. They watched as one of the black fish rose to the butt then dived away. ‘I wonder if they’ve got any paint here?’ he said.

So there was nothing to be discussed. She should have known. No dissection. No post-mortem. There was no corpse. No one had been murdered. There was no mystery to be unravelled. He would find some paint, it seemed, and start painting. What more was there to say? Barnaby had told them the station store had everything they would ever need.

Was it the sound of the wilderness beyond the homestead’s limits that imposed itself on them and made speech an effort? They sat there by the creek, a little apart, as if they were newly met, and watched the fish a while longer. She did not ask him if he had come in search of her, or had come on her by chance.

That night after dinner, Pat and Bill, Barnaby’s father, together with the stockman, Peter, sat in chairs on the wide back veranda. Barnaby and his friend Harry had gone to town earlier in the day. Autumn helped Margery with the washing-up and when they were done in the kitchen the two women joined the men on the veranda, carrying out tea and biscuits to them.
They sat in the dark drinking black tea and eating Margery’s Anzac biscuits, watching white lightning flicker along the crest of the citadel range. Whenever the crickets paused in their chirruping to permit a silence, there was the distant rumbling of thunder. Autumn imagined an artillery battle raging up there behind the fortress walls. Napoleon’s cannon at Austerlitz, or the Somme hidden in the Expedition Range, battles at the portals of hell, never won or lost. No one spoke, and so she kept her silence too. The night and the stillness. Stars and distant lightning. Sudden white images of the serrated ridge far off, making them narrow their eyes. Bill’s two dogs lying at the foot of the veranda steps, their white eyes on Bill, their ears moving when he moved. A large black cat on the top step looking down at the dogs, its feet curled under its fat body, its studied gaze superior, imperious. A caste above the dogs, who waited for the day their chance would come to shake it to death in their jaws.

In the morning she went for a walk on her own after breakfast (there was no one else to go for a walk with). She followed the track along the top of the creek bank, passing the dusty stockyards where the stockman was milking the cow, its calf penned and bawling for its mother. And she went on a mile or so until she reached a grove of vivid green lime trees she had seen in the distance and had wondered at. Something moved within the solid shade under one of the trees and she stopped, a stab of alarm going through her chest. An enormous black boar stood bandy-legged, gazing at her, a skein of slaver swinging from its swollen jaws, from which white tusks curved upward, lethal and threatening. After a half-minute of studying her, the enormous pig grunted and went back to snuffling among the
spread of fallen limes. From where she stood Autumn could see a corner of the green roof of the homestead above the trees, a thin sliver of white weatherboard. She did not know where the others were. People dispersed without signs to each other and went about their business. The sound of a motor in the distance was an indication of work going on somewhere. There was nothing at Sofia that could be called conversation. The homestead sat in the middle of the wilderness, like a fat boy in the schoolyard, eager to cause no trouble and hoping not to be noticed. Fencelines dwindling to nothing in the haze, barely there at all, an accidental touch of the pencil. Cattle stood upside down in the shimmer of heat. A horseman appeared then disappeared, accounting for nothing. Was it the stockman? Trees defied gravity. The serrated ramparts of the range had closed the curtains for the day, asleep behind the wavering haze of yellow distance. The crickets were sleeping too. Or was it cicadas? They would wake in the heat of afternoon. The perfect sound of silence.

She looked at the pig again and he raised his head and looked back at her. There was a smell of something decaying. She walked back along the track. At the yards the stockman was gone and the cow had been rejoined with her calf. She was determined not to go looking for Pat. She went up the back steps. Margery was gutting and cleaning a chicken she had beheaded and plucked earlier. The radio was playing country and western music. The black cat sat by the door observing the movement of Margery’s hands through narrowed eyes. Margery looked up and smiled and offered a cup of tea.

Autumn put the kettle on the stove and stood watching Margery while she waited for the water to boil. ‘I saw a huge wild pig just up past the yards.’

‘That’s Tiny,’ Margery said. ‘He supplies us with sucking pigs on a regular basis. Bill wants to shoot him. But I say so long as we don’t shoot him he’ll keep the other old boars away. I wouldn’t get too close to him. Those old fellers are unpredictable. He has lost his fear of us. They’re like us, they’ll eat anything.’

After they had drunk a cup of tea and smoked a cigarette, Margery put the chicken in the oven (it was to be eaten cold later with salad), and said it was time for her lie-down. Autumn took a jug of chilled lemon water with her and went to her cottage and lay down too. Had the stockman gone back to
his
bed? And Bill? Where was he? She might have written in her journal but the heat pulsed through the thin walls and the day outside was so quiet and so still it was too distracting to write. How had Leichhardt found the will to write up his journal every evening by the light of a candle?

When the breeze dropped the windmill stopped turning. Was something going to happen? She listened to the sound of the overflow dwindling to a trickle, then become a rapid series of drips. The intervals of time between the drips grew longer and longer … and longer. She waited for them to cease, then forgot to wait and imagined she could hear Margery’s radio. But it was her imagination filling the silence. Whoosh-whoosh, whoosh-whoosh, went the insides of her ears. On a ceiling beam a pale gecko watched her with its black eyes. Thinking was difficult.

While they were sitting out on the veranda in the dark watching the lightning the night before she had broken the silence to say she could imagine living out here contentedly for the rest of her days. The silence had resumed after her comment. Was it a silence of disbelief? Then Margery said, ‘Well, that’s nice, dear.’ As if she wanted to nip off the possibility of any discussion of the question of living
out here
. We won’t be having any of that! Isolated comments such as these did not connect or rise to the level of conversation, but drifted and were forgotten, as if the intention was ideally to return all questions to the silence out of which they had unfortunately found their way. But Autumn had meant it when she said she could imagine herself living at Sofia contentedly. Now she wondered how she could have meant such a thing and wished she had not said it. Like making a claim while drunk.

Lying there on the narrow bed in the heat she was keyed up and listening. For what? The immense weight of the silence out there stifled her. The heat was bearable, it was the silence that was pressing down and stopping her from thinking. She forgot to hear the persistent shrieking of the cicadas, then realised they had stopped. It was wearing away at her. Like someone rasping the edge of a piece of tin, back and forth, back and forth. You could take it for so long then you just had to tell them to stop or you would go mad. If they kept at it too long you would have to shriek back at them, For Christ’s sake, shut up! Your eardrums would surely burst if they didn’t stop. Once you heard it you were forced to listen to it. She began to fear the onset of a migraine and sat up and looked through the small window.

The path to her cottage continued on through the grass to the wire enclosure where the hens lived. There was no sign of movement there. Twenty yards or so beyond the hen run the stockman’s small square hut, another fibro construction like her own, stood on its short stumps out in the blazing sun. There was a lovely big shade tree no distance at all from the stockman’s hut. Why hadn’t they built the hut there? Was the stockman inside? Lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, hands behind his head? He was a young man. Dreaming what dreams? What was he thinking about? What did he do with himself all day here when he was not working? She was not tempted to go and ask him. His response to her had been formal and old-fashioned. When she passed him on the way to the outside toilet she said hello and he lifted his hat to her and murmured a greeting, his gaze unable to meet hers, an unbearable shyness making him hunch his shoulders and look off to one side. On horseback he was transformed into a confident man. But she was not going down there to his hut to try to search out the confident horseman inside the shy boy. Still she had to do something or her morale would plummet.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and got up and went in search of Pat. The perfection of her plan would have to be scrapped. Keeping it simple and ideal here could easily mean the end of her. Maybe the end of everything. The dry boards of the cottage floor creaked when she put her weight on them. She realised the cicadas had fallen silent again.

There was the sound of sawing from the machinery shed and she went in. Barnaby’s father, Bill, was a tall stooped man nearing sixty. He was cutting out squares with a handsaw from a large sheet of masonite. He did not look up but kept his
rhythm going, the board behind him wobbling and snapping. ‘We was going to line your cottage with these,’ he said, and he stopped and looked up at her and grinned. ‘But we never got around to it.’ He resumed sawing.

Pat was over by the side of a flatbed truck, leaning over a square iron welding table painting on one of the squares of masonite that Bill had prepared for him. A dozen or so two-and four-gallon tins of various coloured paints were lined up along the back of the table. Pat’s tongue was sticking out the side of his mouth and he was brushing paint onto the ply as if there was no time to be lost. She had not seen him at work before and she stood and watched him, astonished at the way he was going about it. He didn’t seem to be giving what he was doing any thought. He was wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and unlaced boots. The sweat was running down his back, making streaks. Leaning against the wheels of the truck were four paintings already done and drying.

Bill stopped sawing and walked across to Pat and set down four squares of ply against a leg of the table. He did not look at what Pat was painting. ‘Will this do you for now, Pat? I’ll cut you some more later if you need them.’

Pat stepped back from his painting. ‘That’s lovely, Bill. I can cut some myself if I run out.’

Bill lifted his hat to Autumn and said good day and went on out of the shed.

She went up to the table and stood beside Pat and looked at what he was doing.

He lit a cigarette and took a drag then passed it to her, standing looking at the painted masonite, his head on one side, considering. ‘What do you think?’

She took a drag on the cigarette and handed it back to him. The reserve they had felt with each other at the creek yesterday was gone. They were out in the open with each other again now. The curtains open.

‘Is it dead or alive? You’re the only pair of eyes I can trust here,’ he said. He gave her a look. ‘The only pair of eyes in the world I can trust.’ He kept looking at her. ‘So tell me, Mrs Autumn Laing. Do I persist or do I shoot myself in the head with Bill’s gun and get it over with at once?’

‘You’ve got green paint in your belly button,’ she said.

‘Is that your answer then?’

She met his gaze and said nothing for a moment. ‘It’s the only answer I’ve got for you.’

He said, ‘If I was a real artist I’d do your portrait.’

‘I wouldn’t keep still for you.’

‘I’ve got ways of making you keep still.’

She felt the thrill of sex between them. The current was on again. She turned her back on him and walked over to the truck and looked at the drying paintings. She could feel his gaze through the thin cotton of her dress. His pictures were all the same. A three-tiered landscape. It was the view of the citadel range from the homestead. Not observed but imagined or recalled. A reinvention of the real. Part of the landscape that lies beyond reality. It wasn’t what she had been expecting. She said, ‘So you’re not doing the view from the aeroplane?’

He came over and stood close beside her, his bare shoulder touching her upper arm below the strap of her dress. They stood like that, neither of them breaking the contact. The cicada chorus going full bore, as if someone had placed the needle on the record and turned up the sound. He reached for
her hand and her heart gave a violent thump. She turned to him and kissed him on the mouth.

They went to her cottage and made love on her narrow bed. Afterwards they stood together under the shower and yelled as the cold water fell over their hot skin, slapping at each other and shrieking like children. She pointed out the green frogs clustered against the dark beams and he stood looking up at them. ‘This is a magical place,’ he said.