Jacko (8 page)

Peter said, You know my citified brother eh?

I said I'd met him doing a television interview.

—Can you tell me why anyone wouldn't want to live up here?

—No. Though he seems happy down there.

—Yeah, well, horses for bloody courses.

And then he said, You blokes'll have a beer later eh?

His mother said, Course they will. Even if they haven't done any real work.

Petie was not easy with us, but you could tell he was a happy man. He and the stockmen had been out for a week, erecting the great funnel of hessian every day to move and contain the herd, using the light aircraft and Boomer's helicopter and the flash horsemen to flush new cattle out of the scrub, and to compact them into a herd which they could then move on in the afternoon. Corralling the mob at night behind those fabric walls, and then, next morning, driving more cattle in again to join the herd and send the numbers up.

It became clear that Petie had not been in the bush solidly for a week. He was, after all, the boss, or at least the young boss, and he could get the pilot to fly him in to the homestead to see Sharon on most evenings. So Petie's wasn't quite the lonely drover scenario favoured by balladists.

Larson of course wished he could have been out in the mustering camp, to see the white and black stockmen socializing together around the night fire, sleeping in the same camp. Whereas back at Burren Waters headquarters, they occupied separate quarters of the Emptors' little city of cattle. Larson would have liked to have exploited, in his gentle way, the ironies of these arrangements.

—What do you reckon next time we're up here we go on a muster? he asked me.

—Maybe for a few days anyhow, I conceded.

Petie and the stockmen spent the rest of the afternoon letting cattle through some gates and not through others, and then laying the terrible iron to them. We saw a lot of enthusiastic bull-dusting – jumping off fences and wrestling cleanskins to the earth by their horns for branding. Best of all, this seemed to be the specialty of certain skinny Wodjiri stockmen.

A half dozen of the shots Larson took that afternoon would honour the book which would be published eighteen months after his death.

Late in the day I looked across through the dust haze and saw Mum Chloe watching from the homestead verandah, amongst all the beds and all the Thomas Mann. Further along the verandah railing stood a hulking, ample-gutted man who wore only a shirt and had no pants. This was my first sight of Stammer Jack. He had nothing to say to Chloe. If by some chance of destiny I'd been hired to paint the cattle nabob Stammer Jack Emptor and his wife, this is the picture I would have painted. It said, as pictures should, everything about the casual power, the lasting hostilities, the persistence of marriage. Everything too about Burren Waters ennui. It answered, unposed, all questions.

After a time he was gone from the railing: the suspected hypochondriac Stammer Jack Emptor.

Evening light came in like a tide and turned the earth of Burren Waters' main pasturage lavender. We went off with the stockmen to the red-brick dining room and ate a thumping meal of steak. In the middle of it Chloe Emptor – who had apparently dined at the homestead – appeared in the room. Working her way towards us, she spoke to various stockmen and then straddled a bench to sit opposite us.

—I was thinking, I hope you blokes aren't going to coat all this in bloody sugar. If it wasn't for the quarter horses we wouldn't make a decent living eh. As for the Aboriginal stockmen everyone considers too bloody cute for words, they've been useless since they unionized. You can't work with the buggers any more eh. I mean, there're still a few good ones … Anyhow, you won't get any points for sentimentalizing us. That's what's been on my mind all afternoon, and I thought I'd better out with it.

She took a drag from the can of Carlton Draught she'd picked up in the kitchen and carried in her hand. It was the Territory's favourite beer, and half a dozen cans had been issued to all hands along with the steak. She turned her can in her hands.

—Anyway, she told me, no reason for someone like you to be writing about us at all eh. There's got to be a lot that's more interesting going on in your life.

I explained that the Brits and plenty of Australians wanted to hear about her kind of existence. At least there was a British book packager who thought so, and had put up money for such a book.

Chloe bent forward.

—Yeah, but you'd rather be writing about something else. You'd never find someone like Michael Bickham wasting his time writing about people like us. And you're not interested in cleanskin bloody cattle eh. Don't try to tell me that.

—I'm sorry, Mrs Emptor, but I am interested.

—Jesus, I've got a verandah full of books, and all the ones I like are by blokes who just write about their own world. About what they know.

—Okay, I don't have a private income like Michael Bickham. I can't afford not to do this book. And I
am
fascinated just the same. I never knew that people lived like this.

—You didn't eh. Well, it's quickly discovered. I think you're wasting your poor bloody talent.

There are always people who say that to a writer, but one doesn't expect to hear the voice of God, the appeal to higher integrity, in Burren Waters.

—You know your book on Abos? she said. A lot of city liberals liked it eh. But you know bugger-all about Abos. You'd be better writing about when you were a kid or something, or your first love affair.

A few of the white stockmen were sipping from their cans and listening intently. I found that unnerving.

—I'm not trying to be rude or anything, she pursued. But something must have happened to you that you could write about.

—I'm not the sort of writer who writes about himself, I told her. I'd rather visit Burren Waters and that Chloe Emptor.

—No, she said frowning. Take me seriously for Christ's sake.

Though she was the living judgement that ultimately embarrassed most or all writers, she didn't have any malice. This gave her even more the air of one who might have been right. Meanwhile, Larson was embarrassed to silence for my sake, and that at last seemed to produce confusion in Chloe.

She stood suddenly.

—God, a woman's probably said too much eh. Listen, no question you're welcome. That's not what I'm saying. Anyhow, I've got to get back to the homestead to make a poultice for the mongrel. See you boys later.

She went, looking a little lost, as if she weren't proprietor of the place. As she passed them, various stockmen asked her how the boss was, and she said, Whingeing bastard.

—That's a bad ankle he's got though, a senior stockman named Merv told her. We'd met him that afternoon. He was a wiry little man with a skew-whiff thatch of grey-black hair.

—Don't give me bad ankle. You're all a pack of malingering bastards.

—Sit down, Chloe, Merv invited her.

But she wouldn't. She wandered up and down the trestle tables. At last she stood behind Merv. He could not see her. She pointed downwards at the bald crown of his head. Then she bent her arm and raised a fist, grasping the biceps of that arm with the fingers of her other hand.

In case we didn't understand this meant Merv was virile, she added to the impersonation a plunging motion of the thighs. And then she winked.

It was not a snide wink. The Emptors were totally lacking in snideness, that morbid rump of envy.

Outside, later, we could hear generators and see the lights shining in the Wodjiri quarter of Emptorville, administrative centre of Burren Waters cattle station.

The universe seemed immensely in evidence as we sat under the open-sided brush shelter by the cookhouse with the white stockmen and Petie and Sharon and watched a television set for news of the wider world. By grace of the satellite saucer in Chloe's green backyard, there was not only a set at the homestead for wan Sharon to stare at by day, but also one out here on a counter under the brush shelter; a beast on a long lead from an electric socket in the kitchen, the video mastiff from whose first, rare bite Jacko Emptor had never recovered.

In the spirit of this fact, the studiously motionless stockmen frowned at the screen, as if it needed to have an eye kept on it.

Larson and I were quartered in an empty room in the brick stockmen's quarters. Not only was the door not locked, it was not closed. The outer wire screen was pulled across however. Flies were still active. The night was hot and even humid, as if Burren Waters were being asked to pay in discomfort for the lushness which set in a few hundred miles north and north-west. We lay in the dark and could see more stars through the square of window than are seen in an urban month.

—Why did she tell us that about Merv? I asked Larson.

—Well, he said, surer with bush people than I was. To make up for taking you apart over writing.

—Bit of a contradiction, isn't it?

Larson laughed one of his profound, last laughs.

—That's no contradiction. Same thing viewed from a different end. But the point is, how would she bloody know?

So we fell asleep with an engorged memory of Chloe Emptor whose day it had been. We had our alarm set for four-thirty in the morning, and it was a little before that time that Chloe appeared again, wearing the morning star on her shoulder and rattling our wire.

—I got the cook up early for you boys. You can't travel without a breakfast eh.

We opened the door to her, and we brushed our teeth as she chatted with us. She seemed to be trying to feel out and expiate whatever follies she had been guilty of the night before.

She said to me at last, Look I'm sorry for coming the heavy with you like that. None of my business eh. But Jesus, I do like a good read. I wanted to ask you, do you know Michael Bickham?

Bickham was the now aged novelist who had won the Nobel Prize, culturally validating the nation in the mid-1970s.

—I've met him, I admitted.

—Have you read
The Mother as Aphrodite
?

—Yes, I lied. I had at least begun it, and it was customary for people to lie about how much Bickham they'd read. I had read all his early works and found them a revelation. I'd been defeated by the later ones.

—He really knows women eh. The way he writes about that old lady who's dying in that big bloody house in … what's the name of the place? Holloglo. And her weird children. I was wondering, if I was ever in Sydney visiting that useless Jacko, d'you reckon you could …?

—I don't know Bickham that well, I rushed to say. He doesn't mix with a lot of other writers.

Even his name was a kind of reproach. When I was young I'd been compared to him, but I had – by that night in Burren Waters – disappointed those who had first nominated me to be his heir. I had met Bickham a few times at political events. He never had anything to do with the Sydney literary mafia, but invited people he respected to his house. If you were invited, you were proven to be a person either of taste or of talent. If you were not invited – and most writers weren't – you could console yourself that you were in some way a challenge, or maybe not epicene enough to fit Bickham's crowd. Either way, you knew you were telling only half the truth.

Bickham was something of a misanthrope and a gnostic. In rawly democratic Oz, he believed undemocratically in the salvation of only a few chosen and shone-upon souls, and these were the ones he sought to choose for company. In the land of mateship, he despised the herd. That made it hard for his kinsmen to place him in the national pantheon.

But it had to be done. Because the Nobel Committee had spoken … and made him the nation's Nobel Prize winner, and so an institution, like the Monarchy or the Church of England or Anzac Day.

For a start, he seemed to feel ambiguous about me, and the odds were that Chloe Emptor would lie far outside his list of the redeemed.

—You could ask him to lunch, couldn't you? she challenged me. He'd come to your place. And I'd bring Jacko eh, but not the astral bloody sisters. I wouldn't stand for that.

—Listen Chloe, I told her, knowing that I needed to be desperately frank. He wouldn't come to lunch at my place. He doesn't like me. Like you, he thinks I'm a journeyman. Not one of the washed. He thinks I'm shit.

Chloe exhaled.

—Then who's his agent?

—He doesn't have an agent. He transcends agents.

—I suppose he does. He's an absolute genius. And I've got to ask him some questions.

—He's a misogynistic old bastard, I told her. But yes. An absolute genius as well. He wouldn't go on Jacko's show. He wouldn't go on anyone's show, and he wouldn't be interested in lunch at my place. I'm sorry Chloe.

Chloe went to the screen door and looked out at the same morning star which, on first waking, we'd thought she might bring indoors with her.

—Well, I reckon it's not good enough to write great work and leave your readers hanging for a bloody explanation. Maybe you could look into it for me eh. He might hate women but he knows us to the last atom of our bloody wishbones.

—That's how unfair the distribution of talent is, Chloe. Say you use the crappy old term muses.
They
don't give a damn whether you've got an ounce of human kindness.

Larson said, You're right there.

Chloe kept talking though, saying that she had to see him and she knew I could arrange it all if I wanted to. She half-suspected still that it was her criticisms of the night before which made me deny her access to Michael Bickham, that megalith of the Antipodes.

—Anyhow, she said, we'll be discussing this further eh. Because you say you're coming back. I really need to talk to him. Before he dies.

—Yes, we're coming back, said Larson. We want to talk to your husband. And maybe go out mustering.

—Yairs, she growled. Let's hope he's over his sulks by then.