Journey to the Stone Country (9 page)

Bo paused by Arner’s shoulder, standing and looking at the teevee. ‘You want potato cakes with your fish?’

Arner murmured his thanks. ‘Six,’ he said.

Bo stood a moment longer, watching the movie. ‘That’s Ava Gardner,’ he said. He turned and they went out the front door onto the verandah.

At the Pajero Annabelle wrapped the stone in the tea towel again. She stowed it carefully with their mugs and the tea making things in the plastic grocery crate. She closed the back door of the Pajero and went round and climbed into the cabin beside Bo. She looked at him, waiting for him to speak, wanting him to say something about the stone.

He was rolling a cigarette. After a minute he said, ‘The old Dougald Gnapun don’t like being tagged with that electronic thing.’ He laughed and looked across at her, amused by his friend’s misfortune. He lit the smoke and started the Pajero’s engine. ‘He was a real scrubber that old feller,’ he confided gleefully. ‘No one never got a tag on him before this.’ He backed the Pajero off the kikuyu patch and did a flourishing turn, the tyres squealing on the bitumen, and accelerated down the road as if he were kidnapping her.

The last evening at Burranbah, Susan had asked her if she had made a decision yet. She had replied that she needed more time. The thought of returning to Melbourne and sorting things out with Steven disgusted her. She closed her eyes momentarily to shut out the image of it . . . She opened her eyes and examined Bo covertly. She was self-consciously aware of being alone with him. There was a sense of trespass for her in being in his company. It was a very private feeling, this, and was not something she would have been able to make sense of to anyone else, except perhaps to her sister, Elizabeth, who would have scoffed at her timidity but would have understood all the same. Annabelle had ridden the scrubs with her father whenever she was home on holiday from school, but she had never entered into conversation with any of the ringers. Whenever her path had crossed theirs they had saluted her gravely, lifting their hat, and she had acknowledged their salutation with a nod of the head or a small gesture of the hand. It had been a modest exchange of signals. A respectful communication conducted in the ascetic language of signs and silence. A code of conduct observed. Their world, however, had remained an essentially mysterious one to her. And perhaps it had simply been that she had lacked the courage then to speak, to venture beyond the implicit prohibition set in place by the conservative values of her father and mother. She had never rebelled, after all, against the authority of her parents, as Elizabeth had done. After Elizabeth finished school she had returned to Mount Coolon and boldly made that world her own for a few years; until she had tired of her own excesses and begun to be repelled by the isolation.

‘What’s wrong with Dougald?’ she asked, deciding that now was not the moment for her to lack courage.

‘They’re sayin it’s his heart.’

‘They’re doing tests?’ She looked at him.

‘Yeah, doin tests,’ he said without interest and said no more.

She feared the conversation would fail after all. ‘Trace is a snooker champion, then?’

‘She’s got plenty of dash, that girl. Them boys don’t know where to put themselves when she walks in the bar. She’s a bit like that sister of yours used to be before she settled down.’

‘Elizabeth had her wild years.’

‘Yes she did.’

Annabelle had not had any wild years.

He pulled up at the T-junction, leaning forward and watching for a break in the highway traffic.

‘Do you live in Mackay when you’re not camping with Dougald?’ she asked.

He gestured north along the highway. ‘When I’m not out on a survey with Susan, I camp with my sister’s mob in Townsville. Susan’s been getting busy though. Me and her been doing a lot of driving up and down this road.’

He pulled across the highway and into the carpark of the sugar mill. He reefed on the handbrake and sat smoking his cigarette, gazing out through the windscreen at the takeaway.

The sugar mill stood on the flat across from the T-junction where the Maryvale road met the Bruce Highway, its lofty iron walls darkstained with smoke and residues, a wide area of tarred carpark below the walls, like the forecourt of an ancient fortress. The tall chimney stack pumping a plume of white smoke and steam into the blue sky, the sweet heavy smell of the hot cane in the presses, the tremor of machinery. The takeaway and milk bar stood at the edge of the carpark in front of them. Men in blue overalls standing about smoking and coming out with bundles of fish and chips and bottles of Coke.

Bo stuck the stub of his cigarette to the dash and said, ‘Let’s get it.’

They stepped down from the Pajero and went into the takeaway. Bo ordered and they stood back by the magazine rack and waited for their order, as if they were a couple.

‘Do you ever go back to the Suttor country?’ she asked.

He didn’t look at her. ‘I’ve been back,’ he said.

They were both silent for a while.

He turned to her, waiting until she looked at him before speaking, ‘You often thought of finding your way back to Haddon Hill, I’ll bet.’

She began to see that something of importance to him hung on her agreement about this. They regarded each other, thinking back to the country of their childhood. ‘I’ve often wondered, if I were to go back,’ she said, ‘whether it might all mean too much to me.’

He waited for her.

‘Before dad retired he offered me and Elizabeth the management of the place. We turned him down. I think he was probably more disappointed than I’ve ever admitted to myself. It just didn’t seem possible to me then. And Elizabeth hated the idea of ever seeing Mount Coolon again.’ She looked at him. ‘Your grandmother managed Verbena pretty much on her own for thirty years, didn’t she?’

He said nothing, watching her to see where her thought would take her.

‘In some ways, I suppose, I’ve been too afraid to ever go back for a visit.’

‘Afraid of what?’ he murmured, encouraging.

‘I’m not a very bold person,’ she said and laughed. ‘Just imagine, supposing I found the Suttor country meant so much to me that I decided my life for the past twenty years had all been a dreadful mistake?’

He lifted his shoulders in an expressive gesture and said nothing.

‘And even worse,’ she went on, ‘Supposing I found it meant nothing at all to me? They say you should never go back.’

He said quietly, ‘I don’t believe the Suttor country’s ever gonna mean nothin to you, Annabellebeck.’

She said, ‘You seem very sure of that.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I am.’

She had not shared her thoughts about these things with anyone for years. Never with Steven. He was not interested. With Bo she felt she had been given permission to re-admit her memories of those days; riding with her father out in the vast silent scrubs of the Suttor, the incense of burning sandalwood in the air at their lunchcamp fire, the smell of their horses and her father’s pipe, the pleasure in his eyes to have her by his side. Steven had never been interested to know anything of her old country. Like most of their Melbourne friends and colleagues, Steven had considered Queensland culturally a lost cause and had paid it no serious attention. The landscapes of the Suttor had occupied a secret region of her heart never shared with her husband.

Bo motioned to the counter. ‘They got our order.’

The woman behind the counter was watching them, her hands resting on the white parcel of fish and chips and hot potato cakes, waiting for them to take their order.

Annabelle said, ‘The truth is, Bo, I’d love to go back.’

‘Then I’ll take you back,’ he said.

They stepped up to the counter and he paid for the order. She held the door for him and they went out and climbed into the cabin of the Pajero, the strong smell of the hot chips and fish with them. He didn’t start the motor but lit the stub of cigarette he’d stuck to the dash and sat, his forearms resting on the wheel, his hat tipped back. After a while he looked across at her. ‘Any chance you might decide to stay up this way?’

‘I haven’t really thought about what I’m going to do,’ she said. She looked across at him. ‘For now I’m enjoying being here. That’s as far as I’ve got.’

He was silent again, watching the mill workers in their blue overalls coming and going from the takeaway. He said, ‘We lost Verbena. Grandma never sold it.’

‘I didn’t know that. Dad always said there was something strange about Grandma Rennie selling Verbena.’

‘That boy of May’s, Jude Horrie, he always put it about she sold. But she never did.’ He sat up, his hand going out, pointing to the northwest, ‘I mean to get it back. The journey of them old people’s not over yet.’ He looked at her and nodded, looking to see how she might be reacting.

She said nothing, sensing his decision to confide in her and afraid that if she spoke she would deflect him from his intention.

‘They’re still there,’ he said, ‘them highways of the old people. Grandma walked us over them when we was kids. Me and my sisters and Dougald and his brother.’ His hand going out in that gesture of making a precise heading, his thought traversing the country, securing the place in his mind’s eye, the adjustment of his fingers aligning memory to a horizon shape, the landscape of his history within him. ‘She walked us kids up to the head of Verbena Creek one wintertime. Into that virgin bendee and sandalwood scrub. Over into Deception and the Conway Tableland.’ His indicating hand adjusting to the progress of the party all those years ago. ‘Up into that wild country, till we come out at them stone playgrounds of the old people. Way up there below Bulgonunna mountain. We was out in the scrubs a week but we didn’t take no supplies or swags. We took nothing. She showed us how to live off the country. And when we was hungry and complaining she told us, This country is your mother. You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for her. You treat her with respect. If she got a reason to starve you, you just starve and don’t think nothing about it.’ He looked at Annabelle. ‘She never said where she was taking us, she just told us one evening to follow her and she walked into the scrub. She had us all half starved and in tears getting there. But when we walked out again none of us was crying. We was all silent. We knew what she’d done for us. We was grown-up when we come back out of here.’

Annabelle waited for him to go on.

‘That’s what we call the heart of the Jangga,’ he said. ‘That old place of stone circles. You ever hear of that?’

‘No.’

‘All this fishing around for bits and pieces we’ve been doing out there at Burranbah, that’s nothing. I never told Susan about them playgrounds.’ He waited for something to settle in his mind. ‘I’ll take you up there one day.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ she said, and knew it was not the response he required. Was it her own uncertainty, she wondered, or something in him. A memory, perhaps, of the cruel smile in her grandfather’s eyes when the old man tossed down those pennies from horseback, tempting the Verbena children within range of his stockwhip. She had heard of grim rumours about her grandfather. Grandma Rennie coming out of the house and yelling, Get in here you kids! Don’t you touch that old man’s money!

‘I’ll show you them stone playgrounds of the old people, Annabellebeck,’ he said, affirming his extraordinary offer. He drew breath, ‘If you want to see them?’

She had said ‘yes’ but it had sounded more like ‘no’. ‘Of course I want to see them,’ she said quickly. But all the same, she was not sure. It was too much to offer her. It was too soon. She was not ready. She knew it was his most precious thing. He had proposed taking her to his heartland. It was how he had expressed himself. She understood it. But she was not ready.

It saddened her to think the good feeling between them might be lost now and that he would sense in her uncertainty a polite refusal. Surely he would be too proud to ever offer himself again.

She reached and touched his arm. ‘I just don’t know what to say.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful.’

He reached for the ignition key and started the motor. ‘You don’t need to be grateful,’ he said, a touch of impatience in his voice, dismissing the affair as if it were of no great importance to him. He reversed and drove out of the carpark.

They were silent on the way back to Dougald Gnapun’s. She was sure he was already regretting his offer. She wanted to explain that she simply needed more time, but she knew that if she were to say anything it would only make things worse and the knots of misunderstanding would tighten between them and become impossible to ever unravel. So she said nothing.

It was evening by the time they left Dougald Gnapun’s little house in Maryvale. Susan climbed into the driver’s seat and Bo held the passenger door for Annabelle, but she said she’d ride in the back and maybe get some sleep. Dougald and Arner came out and stood side by side in the dark on the verandah. They did not wave but watched the Pajero leave, then turned and went back inside the house.

At the end of the road Susan drove past the cane mill and turned the Pajero north onto the Bruce Highway.

Bo said, ‘Let me know when you want a spell.’

‘We’ll stop for a coffee in Bowen.’

‘And steak,’ he said.

Bo slipped a tape into the player and Merle Haggard sang his melancholy songs. The stream of oncoming traffic going by, the Pajero’s headlights diving into thick yellow smoke drifting across the highway from the cane fires, the trembling glow of approaching vehicles like lost men searching with lanterns in a fog.

The broken shoulder of the bitumen rattled the Pajero’s shockers.

Bo advised tightly, ‘Ease her back, Sue.’

Susan kept her foot down.

They swept out of the smoke into the clear. Venus hanging in the sky ahead of them. ‘You okay in the back there?’ Susan called.

‘Yeah, I’m good back here.’ Annabelle heard herself easing into the local vernacular. Merle Haggard sang,
I got over you just long enough
to let my heartache mend, then today I started loving you again . . .

Two hours later Susan pulled the Pajero off the road onto the floodlit apron of the servo at the end of the Bowen bypass. She parked alongside the only diesel pump. A truck driver filling the tanks of his prime mover. Bo got out and walked over to the men’s toilet. Annabelle stood beside Susan watching the truck driver. There were four big stainless steel tanks slung along the chassis rails of his rig. He looked up at them. ‘How’s it goin there?’