Only the Animals (2 page)

Henry Lawson laughed. He looked cross-eyed and vulnerable from the rum. His gaze slipped onto the goanna at the outer rim of firelight, its loose, scaled throat illuminated.

It wasn't a childhood bond or the rum keeping Henry Lawson by our campfire night after night. He'd told Mister Mitchell that if it were shearing season he would have stopped off to work on the stations and let us be on our way back to Bourke with the bones without him. But he was lying. We were the perfect quarry for a writer sent out to dig around in the bush for copy, almost too good to be true: a madman collector on a camel, son of a man who'd made the family fortune on the goldfields, carrying the stolen bones of an Aboriginal queen from long ago, all while being stalked by a giant goanna. I'd heard him say he liked to put animals in his stories because it made the humans look worse.

‘They didn't really have queens' was the first thing Henry Lawson said after listening to Mister Mitchell's explanation for what he was doing riding a camel along the stock route in midsummer. It wasn't unusual to see an entire caravan of camels lugging supplies across the vast desert, especially further north (we had been brought to this country for that purpose; a railroad was being built on our backs), but as a lone camel, used by Mister Mitchell rather like a fancy horse, I became part of his oddity. ‘Not in the way we think of a queen.'

‘The queen's bones,' Mister Mitchell had repeated in his dreamy way, and Henry Lawson had let it go.

The first day of our journey, the day after Mister Mitchell had bought me in Bourke, he decided it was too hot to wear his boots, and burned his feet to blistering in the noon sun while murmuring to himself the instructions he'd been given on how to ride a camel. ‘Keep your hands by your sides, relax, and sway with the creature as best you can.'

I became afraid then that he would get us lost, and bit a hole in one of the bags of flour hanging against my flanks, to leave a trail. That only worked as long as we had flour, and soon we didn't, and the white trail on the red sand ended abruptly. I cursed myself then for not taking the chance to run away after Zeriph died, off into the redder centre to join the ranks of wild camels whose numbers were rumoured to be swelling, desert outlaws who spent their days destroying the very same things they had lugged to the interior in the first place: stock fences, well casings, railroad tracks, water pumps.

The goanna scuttled closer to the fire, jerking its flat head, then it froze and was once more unsettlingly still. I felt my long spine tingle.

‘They eat meat,' Henry Lawson said. ‘All kinds of meat. Fresh or rotting. I've heard they'll eat the eyes out of a sleeping man's face, or drag a whole sheep off in their jaws. I saw one kill a kangaroo and take chunks of flesh out of it like a dingo. One bite, they say, and you never stop bleeding.'

I looked at Mister Mitchell's padded, sleeping form. He had the bag of bones beside him, clutching it to him like a lover. The way he was lying – on his side, his knees pulled up and head tucked in – reminded me of the way the queen's bones had been arranged in her mounded grave. She had not been laid out on her back when she was buried, arms straight, legs out straight. She had been laid into the earth carefully curled up on her side.

‘His father was fixated on those bones,' Henry Lawson muttered. ‘Like father, like son. They've both always been a bit touched.' He snapped his head around to look at me, as if I had said something. ‘Oh no, it's not what you think. These aren't
those
bones. Not from the killings at Hospital Creek. They made sure to burn those ones up, get rid of the evidence. The queen – he does insist on calling her that, doesn't he? – is from a time before we were here, before old Captain Cook even. Someone at the stockyard told his father about the queen's grave. Now he thinks if he has her bones, the Hospital Creek ghosts will let him alone.'

The goanna hissed, inflating flaps of skin around its throat into a menacing neckpiece.

Henry Lawson ignored it and began to sing softly. ‘We three kings of Orient are/bearing gifts we traverse afar … My god, I'm thirsty. Imagine dying of thirst. You hear about Ebenezer Davis, who was taking a mob of Kerribree sheep along the stock route and got lost? They found his body last week beside an empty waterbag and a note. The sheep had buggered off and left him. Hold on,' he said, and turned the pages of his notebook again. ‘Ah, yes. Good man. I did write it down. “My Tung is stkig to my mouth and I see what I have wrote I know it is this is the last time I may have of expressing feeling alive and the feeling exu is lost for want of water My ey Dassels. My tong burn. I can see no More God Help.”' Henry Lawson sighed. ‘I must find a way to use this. Great theme, death in the bush. Death in general. My ey Dassels. My tong burn.'

I decided then and there that in the morning, once I'd slept off the rum, I was going to run away from Mister Mitchell and Henry Lawson, and gallop on my spindly legs until I was deep enough into the desert to forget what I could not understand. None of it made any sense: Hospital Creek, the ghosts on the goldfields, the bonfire, the queen's bones, the goanna. I wasn't blameless, but I was innocent of
this
, of whatever Henry Lawson and Mister Mitchell and their kind had done. I had only arrived a few years ago, how could I have done anything wrong?

‘God, Bourke. Of all places to ring in the New Year,' Henry Lawson was saying, picking his teeth. ‘We'll be back by then, I suppose. Let's see. There's still Youngerina Bore, Fords Bridge, Sutherlands Lake, Walkdens Bore. Then Bourke. It'll be too hot to think or write. Too hot to do anything but drink until you feel about life as you ought to feel before you start. You know what they say about people who die in Bourke? They get to hell and find it chilly, and send back for their blankets.' He laughed. ‘Many's the night I've lain in the dust outside the Carriers Arms, listening to the drunks making jokes about the Salvation Army woman who sings hymns outside the hotel, all day, all night. It doesn't matter if a woman's cracked, they say, s'long as the crack's in the right place.'

Mister Mitchell suddenly rolled onto his back, threw off the blanket and jumped to his feet, facing the goanna where it stood watching, still as quartz, a few feet away from him. He was sweating. ‘Father warned me about you,' Mister Mitchell said, swaying, pointing at the goanna. ‘He said to kill you, drain off your oil, eat your flesh, and burn your bones to ashes. It's you he dreams about, you who comes to haunt him. It's you who saw him light the bonfire.'

‘You've nothing but the jim-jams, Mitchell, you've drunk too much rum,' Henry Lawson said. ‘Lie down, go back to sleep. It's Christmas night, for God's sake. Ignore the animals. They're our only and most loyal spectators.'

Mister Mitchell ignored him instead. He dug around in his supplies for his shot belt, and began to load slugs in one barrel of his muzzle-loader and ball in another. Henry Lawson didn't stop his old friend. His eyes had glazed over – the rum, yes, but I could tell something else had gripped him. He had to see how it all ended.

Mister Mitchell tamped down the wadding with the ramrod and lifted his gun, aiming at the goanna. ‘The bones are
mine
!'

The goanna bolted in my direction. I lunged to my feet. There was an excruciating silence.

The goanna was dead, I saw that first. I felt my cheek against the cold midnight sand, and found myself thinking of a moment years before, when Zeriph had loosened the ropes and I was finally relieved of the terrible weight of the upright piano I'd carried on my back, all the way from the railhead at Oodnadatta to Alice Springs, counterbalanced by a drum of water.

Zeriph had been proud of me, carrying the first piano into the core of our new country. Not copper from the mines, not wool wagons to the mills, not reckless explorers, not railroad tracks nor overland telegraph supplies, not one of the mounted Oodnadatta policemen on patrol. A piano. A thing of beauty.

But for what? I carried that thing of beauty all that way on my back, with the ropes cutting into my bones, so that somebody could tinkle on the keys for the midday drunks at the pub in Alice. That's what broke Zeriph's heart, that the piano's music could mean nothing without the false prophetry of drink.

I tried to move my head so that I was facing Mecca, but I became confused. I thought I saw a figure in the bush. For a moment I believed the goanna had transformed itself into a woman, into the queen herself. Then I realised the figure was Henry Lawson, half hidden behind a tree, laughing hysterically at the scene before him: a dead goanna, a dying camel, a white man clutching a bag of old bones.

‘I've got it!' he said, between gasps. ‘I've got the last line … And the sun rose again on the grand Australian bush – the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird. I've got it!'

My ey Dassels. My tong burn. Oh, Mister Lawson, be careful. You're not the only one who can tell a good story about death in the wastelands.

 

PIGEONS, A PONY, THE TOMCAT AND I

Soul of Cat

DIED 1915, FRANCE

 

O crossing of looks! Bond that the animal tries to tighten and that man always undoes!

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette,
LOOKING BACKWARDS: RECOLLECTIONS

 

 

Waiting for the Tomcat

It is long after midnight and still the tomcat has not returned to his parapet above the trench adjacent to mine. I have been waiting for him, primed by the soldiers' talk of his legendary night-hunting skills out in no man's land and the way he fearlessly cleans himself while exposed in the sun on the parapet, even in the heaviest bombardments. The soldiers welcomed me when I arrived but seemed a little disappointed that I wasn't also a tom – they like to bet on anything and everything, these boys, and I think they would have liked a wager on who would win the scrap of the tomcats.

What they don't know is that I've always felt I was meant to be a tom and not a she-cat. Colette understands this, my beloved Colette who inadvertently left me behind here at the front after a brave secret visit to her new husband, the awful Henri, who was made sergeant at the outbreak of war and fully believes he deserves the title. She didn't know that I'd stowed away in her vehicle in Paris, overcoming my detestation of blur and movement. But while I was outside the car, distracted by a blackbird, she was discovered and sent back to Paris, before I'd been able to surprise her with the warmth of my body at her shins. Now I'm trapped here until she realises what has happened – she will, I'm sure of it, with her cat-like instincts – and returns to collect me.

I've kept a low profile, and done my surveillance work discreetly. The officers' quarters, far from the fire trenches, appealed due to their trimmings and comforts, but I know the sergeant
has always been jealous of Colette's love for me, and would be delighted to see me harmed. Alone with him one evening in their apartment in Paris, I sensed his malevolence so strongly that my usually dry paws became wet with sweat, and I disappeared the way only a cat can and did not re-emerge from my hiding place until she was home.

I moved away from the base reserve camp, past the support line, and arrived at this mud-churned front, though I would dearly have loved to stay close to the pigeon loft to catch one of those earnest little birds ferrying messages in aluminium
capsules attached to their legs. Can it be true they are motivated to fly the distances they do for the meagre promise of being reunited with their mate on the other side of the partition on their return? They look delicious to me even when they come back ragged and bloody, almost torn apart by German bullets or German hawks, about to drop dead from fatigue. I enjoyed the jokes their human handlers told too. A male pigeon falls in love with a female pigeon and sets up a rendezvous at the top of the Eiffel Tower. He arrives on time. Two hours later, when he is about to give up and leave, she arrives and says casually, ‘So sorry I'm late. It's such a lovely day, I thought I'd walk.'

The fire trench is not my ideal environment, but at least I know the sergeant will rarely set foot here, and the young men who fill these trenches are so miserably bothered by rats which have developed a taste for human flesh that they are glad to claim me as their own trench cat to rival the tomcat next door. It shocked Colette to see what has become of this swathe of the countryside. So many times I have accompanied her on visits to her mother in the small village in Burgundy where she grew up in pastoral paradise. She can summon vignettes of a way of life that most Parisians have long lost: resting her feet on a metal foot warmer filled with embers in a cold schoolroom; feasting on sloes from the hedges and on haws; the chestnut skins she'd throw in the fire, to her mother's chagrin, for they'd later spoil the ash lye spread over the bucking cloth on the laundry tub, and stain the linen. Autumn was always her favourite season, and it became mine too once I had seen Burgundy. It was just as she'd promised: the last peaches, the triangular beechnuts, and the red leaves of the cherry trees quivering in the November dawn.