Gatherers and Hunters (11 page)

‘But what is this you have, professor? Surely this is not the first chablis of the season, and from the Martyr's vineyard? I see why you have both been sequestered without me, enjoying such a special privilege. You will not object if I take just a sip from your glass, Professor? Before my slothful brother thinks to order me my own serving?'

The act of savouring a wine can be a process of finest privilege. Irene knew all the subtleties and as she finished the rest of my glass her satisfaction was enormous, a reward in itself. She licked her lips, and then smiled to me again.

‘You know the legend of this wine, my new friend? It is called the Eyes of the Martyrs. That is a beautiful name, is it not? The white chablis grapes it is made from, they are like beautiful eyeballs, and this wine is truly special. It is grown in the ancient Field of the Martyrs. They say it is because of their bones that this wine has its special magic. You find it a unique wine, surely? There is nothing like it in all of Slovenia, all of Yugoslavia. You have drunk the eyes of the martyrs.'

Her brother did not correct her, or mention our earlier conversation. Irene had become the centre of a sort of whirlpool of activity by now, and everyone – the staff, the singers, even other patrons – seemed to be caught up in her dramatic and perhaps imperious performance. She may well have been an actor, and famous in this area: it was that sort of presence and projection.

Later events became blurred, no doubt it was the fresh wine which by this stage might well have been fermented from the eyeballs of ancient martyrs – or, as I seem to recall Andor maliciously whispering to me as an aside, from other sorts of martyr's balls, if it came to that. It is true, the evening seemed to be degenerating into something more ribald and full of secret winks, leers, whispers and suggestions. One of the Austrian Tyrolean dancers, I do recall, divested herself of her white blouse and I remarked, too appreciatively it seems in retrospect, at the wonderful milky whiteness of her breasts and the almost indecent pallor of her nipples. ‘She must surely still be a virgin, to stay like that.' I think I even tittered. I know I imagined, at that moment, Irene with broad aureoles of almost chocolate brown and erect nipples strong as buttons. I do not think these thoughts were expressed in words at that stage. But they certainly floated in the air. I felt myself almost floating. I cannot even remember if the fourth member of our party turned up, though there is a blurred image of long tawny hair swirling, near my face. And those buoyant white breasts.

The darker fairy tales were certainly more and more in my thoughts, as the night wore on and the events of the afternoon blurred with the bubble of more wine glasses and the giddy effect, I was realising, of those magical mushrooms.

If I was a bear in the woods, and Irene was an all too knowing Red Riding Hood or other pantomime princess, her brother was turning into all the other dark background figures of the scenario: the neglectful father, the sullen brother, the silent woodman, the vampire servant. And that shadowy later presence: another vampire agent?

Wait. Have I given too much away? Have I fancified it all just that much excessively? There had been talk of lynxes released into their old genetic hungers – or their feral futures. There had been, certainly, the waterfall and the source of the Sava, and striking enough it had been. More than striking, face up to it: it was damned nerve-wracking, a much more intimate and threatening sort of presence than Uluru or the Olgas. I was, myself, involved, not excluded.

And there had been the appearance of Irene, with her needle teeth that seemed to grow longer and longer as the night progressed. She ate her mushrooms with wolfish urgency, noisily, slurping and licking her lips. She even (I am sure I do remember this) lifted the plate at the end and licked it all over. She grinned then at me, as if to instruct me to do the same. Everyone was doing the same. The bare-breasted redhead was leaning over her plate to lap its last gravy.

The girl with the blouse; the girl without the blouse. If I think very carefully I am sure I recall, also, the host drawing down a long whip from the rafters and cracking it like a stockman to the rhythm of the accordionist. Did I try to explain stockwhip competitions then? And dare I remember that I did try to unleash the rain-after-drought ‘national joke'? But by this stage there was a swirl of activity around me, and dancing, and the close proximity of bodies, many bodies. And animal cries, gruntings, farmyard laughter and smells and jostling activity, think of it all as a swirl, a vortex dragging the whole night into its centre.

I woke up. It was full morning. I was lying on an unmade bed and realised it was the hotel I had been booked into from Belgrade. It had all the sensations that waking up alone in an hotel room instantly impose on us.

I remember what roused me was a sensation of strong itching. I woke up scratching my neck. As soon as I realised this I dragged my fingernails away. They were bloodmarked. I staggered then to the bathroom with its fussy Austrian sort of decor, and stared at my neck and throat.

There were several marks – four of them – and I had been scratching at these. I realised, immediately, that these must have been from bedbugs. I had once before, in Paris, experienced bedbugs and they made an unerring line for my neck and my throat. It must have been my own fingernails that had torn their little welts into lacerations, rather deep ones. And of course it was coincidence that determined these were spaced around my throat like two pairs of vampire incisors.

Bank Closure

Everyone saw it coming, but that did not lessen the small shock when the initial phone call came, followed by the formal letter with its proffered regrets and the terminology of rationalisation, which is another word for rationing. Rationing is something Bernard just remembered from the Second World War and after, when he was still a small kid. Rationing meant regulations and queues and going without. Sugar rationing was what he remembered, and the time he was almost scalped by his mother because of the experiment he and Beverley-over-the-road had been doing with homemade lollies. The lollies were a failure, the sugar was wasted – he still remembered his mother scraping crunchy remnants off the kitchen floor and swearing, actually swearing. Beverley was barred from the kitchen.

He had spent a great deal of his time rationing, if you think of it. Rationing, not rationalising. There was that period in secondary school when he undertook a long regime of rationing the aniseed balls. He cannot remember why, now, aniseed balls so obsessed him, but he collected them in their hundreds. He stored them under his bed in old Vegemite bottles. And he rationed them out to himself, one at a time, no more than three a day. There were only two of his friends who were ever allowed one aniseed ball from his store. They were Bill and Kenneth, and they swapped precious Malay States stamps for them. Even then Bernard was a sort of banker. When his father took him to the Commonwealth the first time, he was fascinated by the tellers, doling out coins and paper money.

Why aniseed balls? That's too far back even to worry himself with. It was a phase. Like the later decision to ration the number of times a year he allowed himself to go to the pictures. A year. Not a month or a week: even then he had a sense for the breath-span, as it were, of financial accountability.

Later, it was not really surprising that he rationed the number of hours his own kids were allowed to watch TV. Even last year he had noted – or Jean had drawn it to his attention – that instinctively he had rationed the number of minutes he permitted himself to read the morning newspaper. She had timed him. At five past eight, after the ABC news, until fourteen minutes past eight. Bernard scanned the news like clockwork. Even if he had not reached past page three he would fold the paper (four squares) and give one of his little hrrrrmphs, and reach for the car keys. His official day had begun.

What on earth would he do once he had been forced into retirement? The prospect now stared him in the face and had done so since that friendly phone call. He had thought to avoid all the tension and pressure of competition and wrangling for position when he had volunteered to manage the Cunningham branch. He had no ambitions for Head Office or even one of the larger centres. Cunningham was a small town but when he moved there it was one of the quiet little money earners. A number of small but profitable mines had their offices in the town, and there were the woollen mills and the butter factory, whose brand name was known throughout South East Queensland. The rich alluvial flats were first recognised by the explorer Logan, and most of the farmers in the district now had contracts with Heinz. A tidy little town, and the small but flourishing shopping centre reflected that. The year Bernard came in to manage the Commercial Bank of Australia, Cunningham was named Tidy Town of the Year.

After the Bank of New South Wales takeover Bernard retained his position, and his unwillingness to move was acknowledged. The branch maintained strong business, and because the CBA was in there first, it had local loyalties. Not even the Commonwealth had taken a foothold, and the Wales had always been only a sub agency. Well, that takeover was a ‘rationalisation' if you like, but despite the name change all the old customers agreed it was only a surface thing. Old Fred Morrow had bought up six large chequebooks so that he could continue using the old bank name – Commercial, the proper name – in perpetuity. Or at least until he worked his way through them, which they both calculated would be four years. Good old Fred.

Bernard was one of the ones who had lobbied against the name change to Westpac. Perhaps that had been, secretly, when all the rot started and the inspectors grew less accommodating. But he had kept his ear to the ground and he was darned sure that Westpac would never stick. He lost the Ward account to the Commonwealth in the first month. Then all the Schinkler family accounts, the whole eighteen of them. In a small town, that hurts.

But nobody was to know the stranglehold of ‘rationalisation', which had now come to mean, in the district, today, simply the drain to Head Office, down to the City. It had begun almost imperceptibly, perhaps because all the mines closed down one by one. Pit mining had become uneconomical and the State Government was giving concessions to open cut operations and their Japanese contracts. Then who would have believed the woollen mills would ever close? They had been exporting good quality stuff to markets around the world, it was boasted, though their domestic blanket brand was the stuff of their existence. Nobody foresaw the rise of the doona. Or the cutting of trade tariffs. That was the first nail in the coffin. Even the two real estate agents began to feel the pinch then.

A too depressing story. Bernard had survived it all, and some of the recent foreclosures had really distressed him. How could he face old Terry Maloney at the bowls club any more? He gave up competition bowling. He nearly gave up Rotary. When the Commonwealth closed down he did resign from the Business and Professionals. It had become a hollow farce, hardly enough for Whiteheads Cafe to bother with the catering. When Jean started to complain about the empty shopfronts he felt almost personally accused. He spent hours in his backyard vegetable patch. Getting his fingers into the soil soothed him, it had become his obsession. Though he rationed himself. After work, 5.30 to 6.30. Then he showered and was ready for the seven o'clock news which was always depressing.

Bernard was not, normally, a gloomy man. His long success in the bank had been, he was certain, because he had a deep cheery voice and he laughed a lot. He heard all the jokes circulating and delighted in passing them on as if he had just invented them himself. He had been often asked to give a speech at christenings and weddings and engagement parties because everyone knew he could keep them giggling and they would begin to relax. Secretly, he remembered some of those events and the long rows of weathered faces stuck with their own glooms, and sometimes it had been a bit of an effort, but when he did get them giggling and loosening up it was its own reward. He had felt his power and, being Bernard, he had rationed it wisely, not allowing himself to be carried away with his success.

He was known as a modest man, an ordinary bloke; but one who could tell a joke, even a clean one, and the women adored him.

It was not surprising, then, that he found himself out in the vegetable patch, the memory of the official notification still gripping his throat. He would tell his wife later. Jean didn't need to know just yet. She was talking about the trip to Port Douglas and somehow he didn't have the heart. Later, later.

As always, he slipped out of his suit and tugged on the old tweed trousers that hung on the back of the toolhouse door, with their braces and the leather belt (just to make sure). He buttoned up the flies. These old pants still had flies. He found the old shirt, one of half dozen or so he kept down there for the gardening, with its frayed collar and the missing button. He felt comfortable in these old duds and ready for the digging.

There were the potatoes that must be ready now. The soil down that end was clayey and had taken a lot of breaking up with fresh compost and some fertiliser; the spuds should be whoppers, he estimated. Two weeks ago he had made a tentative dig and resisted the temptation. Patience was always one of his virtues. Now it would be rewarded. He measured out the broadest spade, the one that his father had given him, back in the early days. The old man had been a tyrant, but it was amazing the number of things Bernard still retained from then, and the number of actions and habits that endured. Even the gardening. As a kid he had rebelled – or he imagined he had rebelled, though it was simply a matter of demanding some time for himself on a Saturday morning. When he did force his father to give him time off (one weekend in four) he found himself bored and with nothing to do. Even his stamp collection seemed hollow and worthless. It was an evening thing, it did not feel right to be a Saturday Morning pastime. He had returned, of his own accord, to assisting his father, who then gave him his own bed to look after. He still remembered the pure joy when he dug up his first Bernard ­potatoes, as the old man called them. They made a ceremony that very night, a special Bernard potato dish, with butter and a topping of cheese. It had set him on his way.

Still smiling to himself, remembering all that, Bernard ambled down to the back bed. Was he humming just then? He turned the first sod. Yes, the soil was still pretty raw clay, but not as bad as when he first turned it over and of course he should have put in more compost but it was a start. It was a shale mixed in with the clay down this end. That made it harder and was probably why he never bothered to prepare this corner of the allotment for veggies until now. It had remained grass.

Shale was still mixed in with the clay and the compost, and the first potatoes he uncovered seemed to nestle under and around those lumps of pure rock, or perhaps even to split them up with their subterranean energies and movement. Perhaps a couple of seasons with spuds and they would do the work of their own accord, saving him effort with the pick and mattock like this time last year when he first began the bed's preparations. A bed had to be dug, and aired, and composted, and then dug again, and given time to settle, his father had always said. Bernard had rationed his activities and the result was now paying off. The first spuds are generous, more than he hoped for, if he is honest. They will keep, though; they are not the starchy variety that rots easily.

Digging for half an hour, almost ready to call it a day (he looks at his watch: 6.15, give it another ten), Bernard rests on the shovel and wipes the sweat off his brow and the top of his head. It is bald now and his weekly barber visit has become a farce, but old Ernie needs the business. It is one of the little duties that stuck. It is an old habit. Gazing idly down he can see a potato he has missed, among the upturned rubble and shards. He bends down.

Stuck to the tuber with clay there is a rather large, flat stone. With clay sticky hands Bernard wrenches it off and is about to toss it over to the fence, where he has thrown several other larger stones. Something catches his eye. He looks closer. The potato had split the shale – two pieces fall neatly apart in his hand. He rubs his eyes. He wipes one hand on the old trousers and pulls out his spectacles from the ­buttoned-up shirt pocket (Too many times he has had to slouch back to the shed for them. He knows how to rationalise his movements, a real time and motion expert). Putting them on his nose he looks closer.

It is a fossil. A fossilised sprig of leaves. Not a fern, something larger than that. More like the leaves of the Queensland kauri pine in the Municipal Gardens. A multi­pennate sprig, he thinks, remembering from somewhere. Seven, no eight, leaves neatly branching out from a single stem. They are remarkably lifelike, almost as if they had not been underground long enough to rot or decay. And that is the point: the slow process of earth, of weight and heat and enclosure have taken this one twig of an ancient tree and pressed it to its heart. It has been immortalised. Fossilised.

Bernard stares at it for a long time. Something as ephemeral as a single twig of a tree, no doubt one of thousands of trees that had grown and lived here sometime, something that had seemed ordinary and simply part of the busy or lazy life of the valley, Now it was singled out. Now it was made special. All of the endless days, one like another, and he was able to see them as a preparation for this, this accidental uncovering, this discovery. And he had made it. It was his. Discovery is not the new, or the novel – it is the recognition.

It was not easy to describe what he had found, even to himself. Bernard's jokes had not prepared him. He found himself trying to uncover fossil jokes; he was already thinking of how he might try it out with Jean first, and then even make it part of his line with the customers, who must be told of the information in that letter and the closure of the bank and the end of the eighty-five years of continual commerce that it represented. He must indeed think of how to break the news lightly, how to ease the pain.

The potato had broken the slab of shale lightly, to uncover the fossil. It was not Bernard, it was part of the underground life of the spud. The fossil was part of the underground life of the soil, that was more like it. The whole place was full of forgotten or hidden histories, none of it was virgin soil, none of it was meaningless. Grinning to himself now, Bernard moved automatically up to the house, ten minutes early, and with his working boots still on. He tramped into the kitchen as he was, without the surface washing that always preceded the shower. He stomped over the floral carpet of the living room. His wife was setting the table. They always ate at the main table even though the kids have long left them. It was one of their routines.

‘I found this,' he announces, but Jean sees only an ochre-coloured slip of rock. When he points out the fossil and the seven – no eight – leaves with the stem almost as precise in its fibres and veins as a living twig, she is about to say ‘Really' and then chide him. But something about his look, almost boyish and wide-eyed, makes Jean remember, quite suddenly, the young man she had first courted and who had to be nudged into marriage. Those had been exhilarating days and she had felt the first surge of fulfilment.

‘Should you advise somebody? The Museum perhaps?' she says, instead. And they both grow rather excited, as if they had unearthed some real treasure. Almost as if they had unearthed a mastodon tooth or the shoulder of a pterodactyl.