Texas (7 page)

‘I'll get you to give us a bit of a hand around the place. The other blokes'll head out to camp tomorrow. They're behind with the mustering.'

Laura nodded, having no idea what he meant by that.

She took a sip of tea. She should have looked for a job in town or waited until she got to Darwin, worked in a café or a dress shop. But she'd been determined to work on a station in Australia. It started when she read
The Thorn Birds
years ago. It didn't matter that she couldn't remember the story, it was the feeling of anticipation she was left with when she finished it. She glanced at Susannah again but her eyes were elsewhere and her expression inscrutable. Laura hoped they might become friends.

Laura had arrived at the small Kimberley town from Perth five days earlier on a Greyhound bus. Pressing her face to the tinted windows and watching the landscape slide sideways, she felt as though she was trapped in a metal capsule for forty-eight hours. She was impatient to breathe the warm dry air.

Her mind's eye was able to see her travels as a spidery trajectory across the continent, the shape of which she had long ago memorised. When she thought of how much blue lay between where she was now and the green-shaded island of another hemisphere, she leant back in her seat and closed her eyes. When she opened them again the outback sun was surfacing, an aberration in size and colour, breaking through strips of cloud wrinkling the sky. Tree shadows striped the pale dirt and she became breathless at the thought of her own courage. The bus followed the road as it carved through rock and grass and hills that bled red into the distance. Grass grew in thin yellow spears clinging to the contours of the land and the silver trunks of the boabs glowed like fat-bellied sentinels. The bus drove over a steel-framed bridge and beneath was water that curved into a lake on the side she was sitting. The driver turned off onto a gravel road, away from the lake, to where bungalows sat squarely on large blocks of land; eventually he slowed and stopped outside a flat-roofed, brown-brick building with a sign above it advertising Four X. Her pack was taken out from underneath the bus and placed on the side of the road by the driver.

The dirt was fine like flour and it leaked rusty colour onto her flip-flops and between her toes. The door of the bus swung shut and she was left standing alone. She glanced at her watch. It was seven in the morning. There were people she'd met in Perth who could have told her where the youth hostel was but she hadn't thought to ask and she hadn't expected to be the only person getting off at that stop. The place reminded her of a town she'd visited on a tour to the goldfields, a ghost town, but further down the road there were dark shapes of people drifting between the light and into the shade of trees. She walked across to the double doors of the pub and peered through the glass. The bar was closed and the concrete pavement had a sickly smell of spilt beer. She returned to her belongings and dragged them along the dirt to the shade of a tree that had leaves like green butterflies. She heard a vehicle in the distance.

It sounded like a four-by-four as it changed through the gears.

Then it faded. It was so quiet she could hear leaves flick to the ground. They were brittle, hard-edged leaves. She broke one in half and threw it away. Sharp-beaked birds fluttered in the branches above. A grey bird with black speckles around its neck, a dove perhaps, dropped into the dirt like a helicopter landing and scattered dust and debris. It cooed and she realised it was the bird responsible for the persistent call she had heard in the distance whenever the bus had stopped for food. The driver said it was a peaceful dove. Whoever named it must have been comfortable in this strange outback land. Not crushed by the weight of its sky.

Laura's attention returned to the fluorescent light of the station kitchen and the man and woman on the other side of the table. She finished her tea and eventually Susannah offered to take her to her room. Laura followed her through the door and waited while Susannah collected some linen. Laura discovered her room was across the lawn, away from the other buildings. When Susannah turned on the light, Laura saw that she had her own bathroom. They made the bed and, just when Laura thought everything was going to be all right, Susannah

Texas straightened, standing tall by the door, and said, ‘Where did John find you?'

Laura replied at the youth hostel, but she knew the question was somehow more complicated than that. After Susannah left, Laura discovered that the shower produced only cold water.

A few days later Laura was still wary of Susannah. That morning the woman had been angry with her children for wandering across to Laura's quarters. Laura had liked talking to the boys since they reminded her of her niece who would be about the same age as them. Now Laura sat on the cool edge of the veranda, listening to the cicadas that seemed to sizzle in the dry grass. The hills beyond the fence appeared unattached to the earth and she could hear the children in another part of the house. She stood up and decided it was more comfortable in her own place. John could find her there. She walked about twenty metres past the stores shed to the other end of the yard and stepped into the area that was like a veranda enclosed by flywire where along one wall was a single bed. Lying there, it was possible to feel the slightest tremor of a breeze passing through the wire. She wondered if there might be something else to do today, rather than accompany John as he drove seemingly endlessly through the bush and the grass, apparently checking the troughs and the machines that pumped water. She had caught glimpses of wide-eyed cattle and he talked about improving the herd, conversation and silences broken by the intermittent appearance of a gate. She supposed he liked having someone to open them.

She re-read the letter she'd collected at the GPO in Perth.

Perhaps her family had already left for France. Her mother told her they had sold their caravan and bought a new one that had a microwave. They hadn't decided yet but they might stay at the caravan park below the chateau on the hill in the Loire before they drove on to the Camargue and to their favourite place by the sea.
Your father has a new hobby
, she wrote,
he is
painting copies of the photos from our family trips in watercolours.

She enclosed a postcard-size picture of some wetlands and a watery sky above it. When Laura had arrived in Perth it had been raining in England. It was easy to imagine the wet streets, the cars and the buses passing through puddles, a train surfacing from a tunnel, streaming with water, whining to a halt at its station. From there she could remember what it was like to enter their semidetached house in north London, the heavy door and the narrow passageway, the coat rack swollen with padded jackets and beanies and scarves, and then announcing through the thick warm air to her mother that she was home.

But it was harder now that she knew the house in Mill Hill lay empty. There would be a letter waiting at the post office in Darwin. It was another place on the map but there was so much in between. Perhaps her parents would be wondering why she hadn't written and they'd also know she hadn't written to her sister. She looked at the little watercolour painting again. It would be impossible for her father to paint in watercolours the landscape she could see through her bedroom window. He wouldn't have the right palette to use, just as she couldn't find the right words to describe it. She got up from the single bed

Texas to return the letter to the inside pocket of her backpack in the bedroom. It was where she also kept her passport, her return plane ticket and a round-Australia bus pass. The bedroom was a small, square room with an overhead fan and just enough room for a double bed and a wardrobe. The floorboards were a parched grey and marked with splotches of paint from when someone had painted the walls, and the window looked out past the lawn to a fat boab tree and to faraway hills. Without the letter from her parents it was possible to imagine that she didn't belong anywhere.

II

There was no one on the veranda, so Laura moved hesitantly towards the kitchen door. She didn't know why she did that. She wasn't normally shy but the station people made her feel slightly awkward as though, perhaps, she was in need of them and not the other way round. They were in the kitchen talking.

‘I don't know what's wrong with you. You said you wanted someone to talk to.'

‘Oh . . . so that's why she's here.'

Laura was peering tentatively through the flywire. Susannah's knuckles disappeared into the dough she was kneading on the bench. She looked up.

‘I was just looking for John,' said Laura.

Susannah inclined her head towards the table. John was sitting there with some papers spread out before him.

‘Laura, there's a mob of weaners that should be arriving this afternoon,' he said, shuffling through the paperwork. ‘I need you to make sure they're run into the yard with the trough or just get the driver to do it.' He paused for a moment. ‘You can manage that?'

Laura stood there for a moment wondering what to do next, thinking it would be nice to be offered a cup of tea, too embarrassed to move away.

She called through the flywire: ‘Is there anything else you'd like me to do before then?'

There was a pause before Susannah answered: ‘You can water the lawn. Thanks.'

‘What about that stuff by the door?' added John. ‘I keep tripping over it. Why don't you get her to take it over to him?'

‘It's fine. I'll do it later.'

‘What is it?' asked Laura. ‘I can do it.'

Susannah came to the door and opened it.

‘If you want to,' she said flatly, and gestured to the cardboard box on the ground. ‘It's for the old bloke who lives in the caravan near the shed.'

Laura was trying to maintain her brightness, her enthusiasm for being on a station, a place quite different from what she'd expected. It wasn't anything like she could remember from
The
Thorn Birds
. There was a strange emptiness that didn't seem to have anything to do with the landscape.

Texas The old man's camp was about halfway between the work sheds and the cattle yards, beside a small stand of thin boabs that must have grown from a single seed. The area around the sheds was like a desert, the dirt a deep red, compacted from all the traffic that obviously passed between the two places. It was about two hundred metres away from the homestead fence and she couldn't help but notice the contrast between the baked earth she was now walking on and the soft moist grass behind her. The green band that skirted the homestead was like a barrier, coaxed into existence by endless rotations of sprinklers.

The work sheds were part of one big structure, the roof and the walls built from corrugated iron that was either stained red by rust or the dust, the openings beneath revealing spaces cluttered with tyres and welding equipment and broken vehicles. The sound of someone hammering metal on metal came from within.

Irish's camp was an untidy arrangement of rusty iron and spinifex thatch beside an old caravan. The box had grown quite heavy in her arms since it contained mostly cans of food. She walked in under the open-sided shelter and placed it on the table beside the outside wall of the caravan. There were boxes beneath the table and on top there were bottles and plastic containers.

‘Excuse me,' she called, hesitating, wondering whether she should leave, but she was curious about this person who lived like a gypsy. There had been a gypsy camp on the fringe of her grandmother's village north of London. Her grandmother kept a bike for her and her sister to ride when they visited. Before they left they had to lock it up in the conservatory in case the gypsies took it. She remembered her mother being cross with their grandmother for telling them that. There was movement in the caravan and it shook slightly with the sound of his footsteps. He appeared in the doorway, shirtless, thin tufts of grey hair growing patchily on the skin below his neckline which was much lighter in colour than his arms and neck. He looked like a man who was shrinking. He unhooked his hat from a nail in the timber post that supported the roof and sat on the edge of a camp bed. There was the faint smell of urine and something rotten mixed with smoke. On one side of the camp were the smouldering remains of a fire. It was surrounded by three small sheets of iron that must have acted like a wind break, and beside it were blackened pots sitting in the dirt. He nodded at her.

‘You're not that woman from the homestead.' His cloudy eyes seemed to water with the intensity of his gaze.

She smiled quickly. ‘Oh, I just arrived. From England.'

Thinking there was no trace of Ireland in the old man's voice.

‘What've they done with the other one?'

‘The other one?' she frowned. ‘Oh, you mean Susannah.

She's up at the house. I'm just working here,' she added, almost apologetically.

‘Sit down.' He waved his hand. ‘You making me tired.'

She sat on an empty flour drum on the other side of the table, feeling a little like she did when visiting an elderly neighbour in a nursing home: her response to the closeness

Texas and ugliness of old age confused by pity and curiosity. He nodded towards some cuttings of a plant he had hung upside down from one of the beams.

‘Kapok. Call it snow bush too.'

He stood up slowly from the camp bed and limped out to the fire. He unhooked a tea towel hanging from a metal stake and wrapped it around the wire handle of a black can that was sitting on the edge of it, bringing it to the table. He poured dark liquid into two mugs.

‘Kapok,' he repeated. ‘That stuff brought here by the Afghans. Them camel saddles stuffed with Kapok. Seeds fell out all the way from here to bloomin Queensland.'

He heaped five spoonfuls of sugar into his cup from the jam jar on the table and sat back on the bed.

‘I didn't know there were Afghans in Australia in those days,' she said and sipped the tea. It was bitter and body warm.