Journey to the Stone Country (22 page)

Annabelle was glad to have him standing between her and Les Marra. ‘It’s still got its original library,’ she said.

The helicopter pilot called to them, ‘What d’you reckon, you guys? You want me to have a scout around for this bloke Rennie or not?’

Tom Glasson called, ‘Let’s give him half an hour, Drew.’ He turned to Annabelle. ‘Can we take a look inside the house? I’d love to see that library.’

Henry Duncan called to Les Marra, ‘We’re taking a look in the house, Les. You coming?’

Les Marra waved his hand at them, dismissing them and their futile mission. He turned his back and leaned into the cabin of the helicopter, speaking to the pilot and pointing at something.

Tom Glasson walked beside her through the purple shadows of the buddleia, ducking his head to avoid the trailing leaves, the other man a step behind. They went into the house. Tom Glasson stood with her in the halflit fust of the passage and they gazed into the dining room, not crossing the threshold, as if there were a barrier there preventing them, the cone of debris on the cedar dining table claiming their attention, a glitter of gilded dust in the air, the disturbance of the helicopter’s arrival, a dribble of desiccated material filtering from the cavity of the ceiling. An hourglass measuring the decay of the old place.

Henry Duncan looked into the room over their shoulders. He said, ‘Boy, look at that!’ and moved on down the passage, looking in doors and calling his impressions back to them, moving quickly through the house.

When the other man had gone, Tom Glasson said in a hushed respectful voice, as if he were in a museum, ‘My God, it’s like the
Mary Celeste
. I wonder why they abandoned everything? You can just see those people seated here at dinner.’

‘I don’t think it was a sudden abandonment,’ she said. ‘There was only one old woman here on her own at the end. She’d been a widow for almost ten years and was well into her eighties by the time she left. She and her husband had no children and there was no one to take over. When she finally left, and I imagine she left reluctantly as this place had been her entire life since her marriage, I suppose she found she just couldn’t very well take all this with her.’ She turned to him. ‘You came in by helicopter, but it’s a very rough road. Maybe she intended sending for her things later. I don’t know. Bo could tell you the real story. Perhaps she was even hoping to come back one day. People do, don’t they? I mean no one seems to be realistic about their own death when the time comes. About giving things up. We all think we own things for ever. Or maybe she was hoping someone would be found to reoccupy the place and carry it on just the way she and her husband and the generations of his family had carried it on for over a hundred years. Then again, perhaps she just couldn’t bear to think of the house standing empty after all that heroic pioneering effort.’

He said, ‘It’s extraordinary.’

They were silent, looking in at the room.

After a while, ‘It’s haunted, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Don’t you feel it?’

He turned and looked at her.

‘I mean they’re still here, in a way. The Bigges. In this.’ She made a throwing gesture at the room, wanting to explain herself, trusting him to understand. ‘It’s still going on. It’s their ending we’re looking at.
They’re
gone but it’s not finished yet. We’re intruding on them. As you said, it’s as if they’re still here at dinner and we’re observing them from a dimension that’s hidden to them. We’re their future. But we’re scarcely the future they hoped for.’ She waited for him to say something, aware that she wasn’t being convincing. ‘I’ve been working in the study on my own here for a few days. It’s as if there’s something very private and formal taking place in this house, something we shouldn’t be seeing.’ She might have added: It is the Bigges’ last supper in the old family dining room, their supper of dust and ashes. There is something sacred to them and the memory of them in this decay and it is not our business to pry into it. But she feared he might find such thoughts too elaborate. So instead she said, ‘How humiliated they’d feel if they could see us looking on at this dreadful dissolution of their affairs. The Bigges all had long and industrious lives evidently, and now look at it!’ She fell silent. ‘How unimaginable for them we’d be. They’d feel so angry and affronted to see us standing here. So helpless to defend themselves against us. To think that this mess is the result of their faith in permanence and continuity!’

Tom Glasson went, ‘Hmm. But at least people like you and I respect it, Annabelle.’

‘It might be more respectful of us if we left it to fade away gracefully?’

He said carefully, ‘You don’t believe these unique sites should be conserved then?’

‘It’s the decay and the abandonment that move us in the first place, isn’t it? About places like this? It’s what makes them so poignant for us. When we conserve them they lose all that. We polish them up and cherish them. We banish their ghosts and make them safe for the future. We falsify them. Conserved things become part of our present. They become ordinary. The very thing we set out to conserve is the thing we inevitably destroy. We keep the fabric but we lose the spirit. It’s one thing to record the past, but it’s something else to conserve it. I’m not sure that I believe in the conservation of places like this.’

He waited for her to go on. Respectful and ready to listen to the elaboration of her position.

‘Oh I don’t know!’ she said with sudden impatience, hearing herself talking as if she were back in Melbourne with Steven and their friends, constructing a defensible position on the issue. Being intellectually respectable. Who for? What did it matter? Constructing a position, she knew only too well, was more about personal politics than convictions or a seeking after the truth. ‘Some days I feel places like this should be preserved and other days I feel they should be left to sink back into the earth without a trace.’ She smiled brightly at him, hoping they could have done with this conversation. She had had enough of it. She was impatient for Bo to come back and take over so that Tom Glasson and the helicopter people could finish their business and go away and the five of them could return to being a family again. Their remaining time together seemed suddenly brief and precious and she resented wasting any more of it on Tom Glasson. ‘Come on!’ she said firmly, and she took his arm. ‘I’ll show you the study.’

Arm-in-arm, they withdrew from the dining room as if they were a couple and they stepped across the passage to the study where she had been working. She caught a whiff of his cologne. At the door to the study she took her arm from his and let him go in ahead of her. He stood by the desk, touching the bevelled timber with his fingers, glancing over her notes and the laptop. ‘You were working in here when we arrived?’

‘Yes.’

‘We intruded on you as well as on the ghosts of the Bigges.’ He smiled.

‘I’ve been making a start on a draft of the report. The European remains. Not conserving, just recording.’ She laughed. Through the window she could see the helicopter poised on the flattened sugar grass, its red and blue hull gleaming in the sunlight like the potent abdomen of a giant hornet. Les Marra was sitting in the pilot’s seat talking on the radio, a gesticulating figure in silhouette. She could feel his energy from here, a man engaged in the affairs of his people, to become their hero, celebrated, potent, powerful and feared. The pilot was crouched beneath his craft servicing an open port. She looked away.

‘A fine room,’ Tom Glasson said, his pale fingers caressing the crafted timber of the desk. ‘My father would have been comfortable here. You expect the smell of pipe tobacco and cigars.’ He looked at her, ‘How long is it, I wonder, since George Bigges worked at this desk?’

She shrugged. ‘Thirty years? I’m not sure.’

He stepped across to the bookshelves and leaned to read the titles, murmuring the maloud, a slender forefinger tracing the spines.

She watched him. ‘You’re based in Sydney, I suppose, are you?’

He straightened. ‘Yeah. We’re Sydney, Annabelle. We’re planning on coming up to Townsville once this dam gets off the ground. Our kids will just love North Queensland.’

Her attention was caught by a movement through the French window behind him. Henry Duncan lowered himself into the squatter’s chair on the verandah, stretched his legs out onto the rests, his arms draped over the armrests, testing the old chair for the style of its comfort. She realised she could no longer hear Arner’s truck, just the steady thump of his music. She noticed then that the helicopter was deserted. No sign of Les Marra or the pilot. She wondered if Bo might have come back.

Tom Glasson stood looking out the window at the helicopter.

‘I’ll show you the rest of the house if you like,’ she offered.

They went out of the study and along the passage to the next room. They went in and stood. Silent, looking. She leaned and opened a small drawer in the dressing table and stepped back for him to see. There were combs and half-sovereigns, pins and faded ribbons. She closed the drawer and opened another. Loose postcards and bundles of small square letters. She picked up a postcard. It was a picture of the Manly water chute. She turned it over and read aloud,
Dearest Nel, A lovely day here. Please read what it says the other
side of the p.c! Saw old Bing when he was down in Sydney, but rushing around
for two whole days in the heat. Spent the morning planting bulbs.
She put the card back and closed the drawer.

They made a respectful circuit of the room. Tom Glasson’s hands clasped behind his back, leaning deferentially to view these banal fragments of the Bigges’ privacy, the stained chamber pot under the iron half-tester bed, the canopy fallen across its head, the supports rotted and broken away from the ceiling boards. On the washstand, paw tracks in the dust of its grey marble top, the toilet set intact, basin and ewer, soapdish and toothbrush holder, each item delicately trimmed at rim and base with rows of tiny pink roses. The faded rug, the dressing table with its little drawers and secrets, the bowfronted English chest of drawers. They paused at the fireplace and stood looking at the blue enamel clock in its belljar, the hands at a quarter to eleven, wax roses, grey with age, in urns on either side. And by the French window a modest cedar table with a single drawer and a single straight-backed chair, placed where the evening light must fall and a view of the great trees along Ranna Creek. To sit here and write her journal and her letters. Intimate. Private. Solitary. A woman’s desk . . .
Dear
Steven, I am not coming back.
It could no longer be Dearest.
I knew him
when I was a child. There are connections between us you would not understand.
In this place I am becoming myself again. I don’t think you would find her nearly
so interesting as the former Annabelle. She is really a North Queenslander at
heart . . .

Tom Glasson said, ‘I think Bo might be back. There’s no one at the helicopter.’

They went out and walked across to the kitchen. Les Marra was leaning over the table, Bo at his shoulder, the pilot standing by looking on. A map spread out on the table before them. Bo smoking the wrinkled stump of a cigarette, holding a corner of the map down with his free hand, his hat set back on his brow. The three of them looked up as Annabelle and Tom Glasson came through the door.

Les Marra put his hand possessively on Bo’s shoulder. ‘This is Bo Rennie, Tom.’ He grinned, a satisfaction in his hard black eyes of something superior; as if Bo Rennie were his trophy, called up by his own mysterious invocation from a secret place in the sacred land. The real thing!

Tom Glasson stepped up. He and Bo shook hands and greeted each other, respectful and wary.

They gathered around the map. A white square in the bottom right-hand corner boldly titled above the legend,
BURDEKIN CATCHMENT STUDY—RANNA DAM SITE: PONDED AREA
. In the middle of the map a straight blue line linking the steep southern flank of Mount Cauley to the escarpment wall, blocking the course of the Broken River. The gate through which Bo and Dougald had driven the last of Nellie Bigges’ cattle twenty years earlier. The blue line continuing on from the wall, following a contoured elevation through the ridges above the Ranna Creek and eventually linking up with the other side of the gate, islanding in blue the region that was to become a lake. As if it had already become a lake. The legend gave the maximum depth at the blue line as 292 m above the bed of the creek. The road past Zigzag overlooking Lake Ranna, where the valley had been. The spur track marked by a wavering line of red dashes that petered out at a huddle of minute vacant squares: the Ranna homestead site. Deep beneath the cold waters of the lake.

Les Marra covered the ponded area with his open palm, covering the homestead and its huddle of buildings. The back of his hand was heavily scarred as if he had been burned, his fingers thick and strong. He leaned his weight on his hand and gazed at them steadily from under the wide brim of his black hat, waiting until he had their attention, then waiting some more while they speculated in their minds on what he might be about to say to them. When at last he spoke his voice was thick and congested, ‘She’s all gonna be drowned.’ He watched them, something expectant and exultant in him, the pupils of his eyes in the halflight of the kitchen large, vitreous and nocturnal, as if he saw into their hearts and saw through the thick slab walls of the old kitchen to the black water of the dam, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘We’re near enough three hundred metres under water here.’ The dam a fact in his mind, visiting the future with certainty, his own future.

They stared back at him, venturing nothing against the cold weight of his assurance. His hatred. His black shirt and black jeans, the red and yellow feathers trembling in his hat. A man attired in the uniform of battle. A general of the faithful. A man engaged in a thousand year war. An entranced prophet, elevated above his days, a power delivered into his hand by his vision of the future. He might have announced to them:
I have returned not to reclaim this
country for my children today but to visit the apocalypse of my retribution upon
it! To damn the Bigges and their estates in perpetuity! To obliterate memory of
them and sink their pitiful remains beneath the waters of Ranna Creek, risen upon
them so unimaginably in these new days! The Bigges built high, but they did not
build their dwelling beyond the waters of this flood that I have made!
He laughed, an abrupt gasp at the comic ironies of his position, the weight of his presence filling the room. They could only be secondary to him. He gripped Bo by the arm. ‘She’s gonna be a big one this feller, Bo,’ the laughter in his voice, his certainty of eventual victory, even if it were to take a thousand years.