The Following (16 page)

And their cries of, ‘Carkle’.

Kyle liked ‘gloss’ for a crow’s feathers, but there came a wretched comma again, the third one, too, with, so to speak, a finger stabbing the air for a few seconds accusation. Kyle thought Wordsworth a true poet. Coleridge, too. Alexander Pope had his own sorts of rhythm but made something of them more like a commentary than a boast. By the end of ‘Carkle’, though, you felt the truest and most hopeless creature in the world to be was a crow, flopping over a landscape very like the one Kyle drove through with his overseer at the wheel and the noonday sun beating down on them.

I
NVERARITY WAS THE PROPERTY BOUNDER
bought for Kyle when Kyle had no way of getting capital, and when Kyle made a mess of its finances, Inverarity was sold to a pastoral company with Rosemary and Brian MacKinlay as directors, along with city investors. Kyle was installed as manager without needing to shift houses.

Ross Devlin went back a long way with the MacKinlays. He’d been warned off them by his father but winsome Rosemary won. She’d eventually got him to Inverarity when he was in his twenties, first as jackaroo and then as overseer. He was now thirty-seven. For thirteen long years he’d stuck – years when Kyle was kept on by a company policy that venerated the name Morrison while bemoaning the losses.

Inverarity would carry the losses for the sake of Bounder’s rhymes in ‘Larrikin Larry’ –

Larrikin Larry

Of Inverarity

(et cetera, et cetera)

– but only so far.

Now the directors had taken a step. They’d subpoenaed the Bounder Morrison Literary Estate for an audit of deeds from when Bounder made transfers of title, cupboards unopened for years spilling scrolls of spidery-pencilled land maps, one built on the other, each superseding the other but needing a lawyer to say how, another to say how not. The directors were hardly unaware of a possible problem. They’d been quiet about it for years. Now the sleeping dog was awake.

‘That car you saw,’ said Devlin. ‘The Jag.’

‘Yes?’

‘Before it was Max Petersen’s it belonged to a man named Atkinson, Tim Atkinson. He liked the better things of life.’

‘So?’

‘Atkinson was a party insider.’

‘I suppose not the first,’ said Kyle, ‘to wallow in the trough.’

‘He set up a company. It prints magazines. It does all right. Max Petersen’s taking it over. He’s been given the nod.’

‘What’s your point, Devlin?’

‘Tim Atkinson’s wife, Luana, she’s getting older.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘Max Petersen’s helping her out. She’s in her eighties.’

‘Good man, your friend.’

‘She’s a Milburn.’

Kyle said nothing. They drove on a bit.

‘Name ring a bell?’ said Ross. ‘Milburn?’

‘No, just a very dull thud,’ said Kyle.

Of course he knew the name. Knew the people. Working people, railway people, travelling people. There’d been hardly a day since Kyle came to Inverarity when he hadn’t thought about the Milburns. Intervals of years passed without his ever setting eyes on them. Then he’d run into one in the Swamp and whole families of them would be there, camping. Chewing the fat, when he asked where they came from they said, ‘the Swamp’.

No, where they first came from. ‘Milburn is an English name,’ he’d push, when he was younger and had that spark of interest. The answer was blank surprise. They came from the Swamp. Nothing went back from there. So the Milburns’ lives were lugubrious, dim. Kyle did not know one from the other after all these years, except for Jenny Milburn, a beauty – how could anyone miss her? – striding through town, wild hair, wild eyes, a look wrenching men’s heads around.

M
EADOW
F
LATS, THE
M
AC
K
INLAYS
’ M
EADOW
F
LATS
, six hundred miles to the south of Inverarity Station, in high, cool country near the national capital, was where Kyle was born.

In the 1930s when Bounder Morrison sold Meadow Flats to Rosemary’s father, ‘Billyum’ Wignall, it was in order to buy Inverarity, or more truthfully to leverage the mortgage for this great big extravagance of an outback spread on a baking plain that was now closing in on Kyle as it had seemed to do all the days of his life, only faster now.

Meadow Flats went to Rosemary on the death of her father, and that was all very good and how it should have been, in Rosemary’s loud opinion. But as time went on she’d felt robbed because the rest of the estate, the mining and industrial stock, went to her older brother, Powys. When Powys Wignall took over the shares they weren’t worth a bushel or a peck. He might have helped her with his cleverness if she’d got some. Now he was rich.

Rosemary looked like a scrag or a witch in her worn, baggy jodhpurs and bush hats with tatters of dusty ribbon and parakeet feathers stuck in them. Powys was the other writer in the family of Morrisons and Wignalls set apart in Australian eyes for their social pretensions while living on shrinking funds and blowing the tin whistle of art. Except Powys’s funds weren’t shrinking.

Meadow Flats used to be a long way out in the bush but the national capital dragged it closer in when roads were sealed and suburbs expanded. After selling off a few paddocks, the MacKinlays found they had a drive-in theatre in the gully where as a boy Kyle had ridden through bushland as important to dreams as the Swampland Block was to him now. Sitting on a blanket, the MacKinlays watched William Holden and Kim Novak in
Picnic
, no sound but shapes and shadows tall as manna gums. They grew lucerne and raised fat lambs in an enterprise a bit like squeezing toothpaste from a flattened tube. Their debts were unending. Years ago they’d sold a paddock to Marcus Friendly for the Friendly House against their political beliefs. They’d continued selling off like the Ouroboros consuming its own tail.

The MacKinlays would be taking the long drive north-west on Tuesday fortnight for their six-monthly inspection of Inverarity. It was not all theirs to dispose of. Not by any means. Listening to Rosemary carry on you would never think so. They were, in fact, merely executive directors for investors in Pitt and Collins streets who never dirtied their shirt collars. Even so, Rosemary carped that the Swampland Block was ‘the jewel in the crown’ of the Inverarity Pastoral Company’s holdings, the meaning of which was, ‘We have our eyes on it.’

Kyle believed the intention was to sell Meadow Flats, the leftover rump, and get hold of Inverarity by divine right or some other primitive holt. Devlin had his own plans, not as obvious. A lot of telephoning went on from the post office in town so it wouldn’t be overheard on the party line.

There was pressure on Kyle – had been in the years since he’d turned sixty. He was frankly wanted off the place. And if that’s what they wanted they could drag him out feet first. He wished he’d got rid of Devlin. Murdering him was hardly an option, a stake through the heart attractive though it might be. Couldn’t he just have a fatal accident? There’d be Rosemary in the car and Milburns packing it to the roof-rack as it spun off the road and burst into flames.

Normally after a few years a promoted jackaroo would have served his time as overseer and moved away to manage someone else’s property or with the help of the bank bought his own place. Devlin was the ageing midshipman in a Hornblower novel, abject with thwarted ambition in a ship of grown men. Other staff Devlin’s age made their moves, got married, had families, took out a loan, bought their own places, thrived or didn’t thrive – at least they did it themselves, out of sight.

But here was Devlin on the one hand, Rosemary on the other, crows on a fence post waiting.

Elisabeth liked Ross Devlin, most women did – the boy who’d come to them heartfelt but truculent and grown into a man protective of heart, feeling of eye but still truculent. He confided matters to her that she could hardly pass on to Kyle.

Devlin said, confirming what he knew in relation to going back years with the MacKinlays, that the fenced-in acres of the Swampland Block that Kyle would not have touched out of Inverarity’s half million were the ‘jewel in the crown of the jewel in the crown’ and ‘a prize for the picking’.

‘Where’ve I heard that expression before?’ said Kyle, dry as a drought-year cowpat.

They were almost home. A whisky awaited Kyle. His tongue curled inside his mouth. A whisky and his darling Elisabeth. He needed a drink whenever he tussled with Devlin; a good way of getting rid of him was to guzzle himself into a stupor.

Devlin dropped Kyle and took the car around the back. Boss and retainer. Which was which in the tug of influence?

They parted across the dusty width of the yards to their respective quarters, home brew for Devlin, his laundry tubs a lab of malts, hops and the pale hooch that he stored in square bottles and gave away on May Day. Something a little more refined for Kyle, a homestead dining room assortment of gleaming decanters.

‘In a country of thirsts all hung on the administration of liquids.’ It was a line from
No Ring of Bells
, by Powys Wignall.

Elisabeth took Kyle’s arm and they went inside. Argus the stud fox terrier pranced ahead of her, thin as a whippet, proud as a picador. Kyle was against terriers because of their habit of going after snakes but conceded their supremacy in sniffing them out in the house. He saw the delight in Elisabeth’s eyes when she gathered pups in a basket and set them down at the end of their bed, and wondered to himself why he’d ever argued against them.

A wide, flyscreened area of the house formed what they called the Arcade. It was built by Kyle and the early jackaroos, including Powys Wignall prewar. There was nothing like it anywhere in the state. Tea things were laid out there, in one small corner of that vast-roofed space. Elisabeth chased around getting the pups back together while the kettle boiled and Kyle threw back an ‘emu’.

The mail was stacked ready to go through but Kyle merely glanced over it. Elisabeth was station bookkeeper, storekeeper, accounts clerk, postmistress. Had been since the day they married. She kept the mail up to date without worrying Kyle too much and handed him his correspondence from the Australian Museum with consoling enthusiasm.

N
EXT MORNING
K
YLE BRUSHED CRUMBS
from his chin, dabbed away dried egg, kissed Elisabeth, clamped on his hat and stepped into the glare for the day’s routines. Unless the Swampland Block was on the list, thrilling his veins, Kyle could not always swear what day it was. His eyes hurt. When he peeled back his lids they were like torn cardboard.

In the battered Land Rover used for paddock tours, Kyle clutched the handgrips with aching fingers, jolting old horseriding fractures down through his arms, ribcage, hips, thighs, knees, into his feet, out along each joint and into his gnarly toes.

They drove where Devlin thought they should go, ticking off a list. They’d breakfasted in the dark. The jackaroos had their horses out. Animal tracks led to watering points like desiccated veins. It was gallop with them or simply plod. Jackaroos were under orders not to drink water before noon; it would make them thirsty all day. When they met up and uncapped their waterbags at noon, the mineralish water was like medicine, giving them the squits. Kyle himself passed blood on occasion but held to the rule for the sake of example.

Sitting in thin shade eating sandwiches, men and boys picked over slices of fatty mutton and mustard pickles. Gristle was chewed and spat. Shreds of silver foil stuck in the cheese slices and between the teeth. A wormy apple was supplied apiece.

Inverarity jackaroos were red-eyed, competitive young men from Kyle’s old school, or schools like it, who regarded Inverarity as Kyle did: an extension of unfinished life but with possibly interesting aspects. The first of these was they’d leave Inverarity with a story to tell. Kyle was the topic, son of the famous Bounder, the meaning of Inverarity distilled. At night they leafed through Bounder’s poems and competed quoting tongue twisters.

Devlin was the odd man out. A Catholic, he’d been to a Catholic school. At fifteen he’d trained on the rural side of a Catholic concern where horse-breaking and growing potatoes were required skills, and making your own furniture from crates and kerosene drums was an after-hours recreation, as was leatherwork – reins, bridles, decorative wallets, big-buckled Western belts with patterns of the Southern Cross chasing in a circle. On Inverarity they all did their own leatherwork, washed their own clothes, did their own sewing, their saddle and halter repairs – it was how it went on the land – but Devlin was Catholic, and some kind of socialist as well, right down into the soapy laundry tubs as he made out there was more to mending your own duds and washing your own shirts and jockey shorts than getting by. God only knew what. Each side played the pastoral game of hardness and contempt.

When he went to town Devlin drank at the bottom pub. On election days he handed out how-to-vote cards with a dismal, deadbeat lot. He turned the latest election defeat celebration booze-up in Tatt’s into a wake by barging in drunk from the bottom pub and reciting Lawson on blood on the wattle till they kicked him out.

Kyle hardly ever rode faster than a walk, despite the legend in rhyme; rarely climbed out of the Land Rover when they went around the paddocks; was sometimes drunk at dinner, face down in the soup; let Elisabeth make decisions; didn’t listen to Rosemary MacKinlay when she came on pastoral inspections, so she shrieked; lost track of what he was saying in the course of an ordinary sentence; stopped the jackaroos from killing snakes; spent time banding birds in the Swamp when there was work to be done; left the hardest decisions to Devlin, who had no choice sometimes except to come down to the jackaroos’ quarters in the name of Kyle and knock a bloke to the ground.

On Sunday nights, though, when they all came together again after their day and a half off, and the jackaroos were not required to wear jackets to dinner, and Kyle in shirtsleeves cooked chops and sausages over a rusty drum in the garden, and beer was served, then it was all right.