When Colts Ran (27 page)

She shrugged. He leered.

Hooke liked her. She was wife number three. New life, new wife, new spread, new friendships – it was a pattern in country purchases, newly emerging, a counter to drought-shrinkage.

‘I never know what to make of art,' said Hooke, looking around at the pictures, all by known names, he supposed, and worth plenty. ‘But I like Norman Lindsay,' he said, recognising a nude with plenty of chest.

He was unable to square the wispiness of the one over the fireplace with the bluff man who'd produced it. ‘Around Liz and the twins it's a different story, they'd have lots to say.'

‘They could sit for me.'

‘Sit?'

Merrington made a scribbling motion with his hand on an invisible easel. ‘Twins pay double,' he said, in a bargaining tone.

Hooke said, ‘For doing nothing?'

‘He's a lightning
croquis
,' said Dominique. ‘A fast worker.'

She meant sketcher. The double meaning escaped her. Merrington caught Hooke's eye.

‘There would be no funny stuff,' he pouted, ‘I can assure you of that' – making Hooke feel he'd had an unworthy thought, when really he was just giving the man his due, reflecting warmly, through a haze of whisky and wine, how there were more ways of skinning a cat than were dreamed up in his little corner.

‘Think of it this way,' said Merrington. ‘Get the beast right and you never have to feed it or shift it around or call the vet when it gets the staggers.'

‘Agreed,' said Hooke.

‘Doddery means dollars in the art game.'

‘Ha, ha, I'm with you,' said Hooke.

He stood, yawned, stretched, patted the dogs and said he'd better be going. The thought of Lizzie and the life they had was a magnet in the night – her warm toes pulling him over to her side of the bed when he came in, and the way they slept in each other's arms until the early rooster crowed and they woke holding hands as trustingly as children.

‘It's still early,' taunted Merrington. ‘She's got you by the short and curlies.'

‘Maybe so.' Hooke grinned.

‘Dear me, Edooward,' chided Dominique, joining the farewells at the door, ‘I imagine Alung doesn't have the luxury of sleeping in like you do,
dormir comme un loir
.'

Feeling blindly towards his car, Hooke heard Merrington's voice answering her back. It seemed the new wife was being paid out for verbal slips. But why shouldn't a man sleep late if he could? Give Hooke the chance, he told himself, he'd sleep past noon every break he got. Merrington, thought Hooke, was lucky in not having to show up at daylight at yet another set of frosty yards, running through the same whiskery old palaver every day of his life for the sake of the national debt and carrying staff members effectively on the sorry list.

Although not every day really. For there were times mid-month or early in the week previous to cattle sales' Fridays when Alan Hooke's phone fell silent for up to an hour and the winter sunshine poured across the oiled boards of the agency. Then Hooke went around wiping dust from old photographs and chasing blowflies with a ruler. Then he gave the indispensable Jenny Garlick the morning off to visit her mother in the elderlies' wing of the district hospital; and sent Henry Tuck on hourly rates delivering hardware around town from the back of the old Bedford while Colts sidled off at noon to the Five Alls and didn't come back.

Then Hooke was ready for visitors to his alcove under the stairs, the green-stained electric kettle ready on the boil, instant coffee spooned from a jar and a packet of Chocolate Wheatens ripped open and available to anyone who wanted to grab. And intermittently in they came and grabbed – old graziers on their stick-assisted rounds, former loyal clients of Hooke & Hooke, bygone strong men of the Isabel diminished in their bones and down from their outlying acres and wind-rattled pioneer homesteads for good. For the betterment of their old age, and the pleasure of their wives, they'd bought brick-veneer bungalows in town with decent plumbing and cement driveways painted green. Randolph Knox, the odd man out in this sequence, had restored his stone cottage with a walled rose garden, justly famed.

‘Up at the Fives,' thumbed Hooke when Randolph came in looking for Colts like an old tortoise wrinkly-necked escaped from his shell.

Hooke knew what was coming when the oldsters nudged him in the ribs and told him another one about Careful Bob, and the one time Careful Bob had got the better of them, the cunning old rat of Tobruk. Except Hooke knew it wasn't just the one time because his father had taken the long view always.

The best example of this was the Bullock Run. It started with those thousand acres bought from the Homegrove Knoxes in the late 1940s. Along the rim of the Dividing Range were more parcels of land Bob had bought for barely the cost of a packet of fags in the '50s and '60s at mortgagees' auctions, deceased estate clearances and the like. Once a scattered mosaic intersected by logging tracks, by the '70s the paddocks passed to Hooke amalgamated whole. Now with the millennium looming they were a treasure.

The Bullock Run, four thousand acres of mountain fastness, responded to years of aerial supering and low stocking rates, whereas on Hooke's home block, his rocky three hundred acres just out of town (the house within sightline of St Aidan's belltower) Hooke ran fine wool merinos until they nibbled the ground almost bare, a choice little flock biding time and building up numbers among the wild turnip and saffron thistle. Hooke guarded their increase from marauding town dogs with a policy of once warned, never reminded. The sheep would remain a mere sideline until wool improved and Hollywood Boy III paid his way handsomely serving ewes. Meantime on the Bullock Run a herd of Black Angus covered the twins' maintenance and education expenses and left change for a red MGB – or some such whim of nature – that Hooke planned wheeling in for Liz's fortieth birthday surprise.

Then there was the time, the old men cackled, competing for Hooke's attention, when Alan was too young to remember, so they said, when Careful Bob had driven warily around the corner near the Catholic church (back postwar when the roads in town were still rough dirt) and the passenger door flipped open and infant Alan rolled out on the gravel.

‘You wouldn't remember. You sat there like a little king directing the traffic, covered in dust.'

‘Did I just.' Hooke smiled.

‘Yeah, till Bob in the Saloon Bar of the Five Alls bought you a raspberry syrup and looked around wonderin' where you was.'

So he had the old men. But since that evening with Ted Merrington, Hooke came back to a thought – opening the door to the street and advancing his indefinable understanding towards that peppery man. It was what he wanted, and why this should be so Hooke wondered. There had been no sighting of Merrington since the night of the big headache when Hooke had driven home seeing double all the way. At the end of that week the monthly statements had gone out as usual, including Merrington's with a few necessary adjustments.

One day it snowed down to the thousand-metre contour line. Colts stayed home with pleurisy and Hooke went round and mixed him a whisky and lemon. In a distant gap of steely-grey clouds Hooke saw the Bullock Run dappled through the state forest. He imagined the black cattle with snow striping their spines and lacing their sturdy haunches.
Get me up there
, he vowed.

Suddenly there was Merrington, haggard and huddled in houndstooth sportscoat and Jaeger scarf, crossing windswept, deserted, inhumanly bitter-cold Gograndli Street and meeting Hooke face to face.

‘Hello, bud,' he wheezed through his teeth.

‘Ted, good to see you.'

Merrington's tongue, white as limewash, rattled as he shaped his words. Hooke had the feeling he'd forgotten his name, though not his function, as he grabbed him by the jumper and drew him close.

‘Where's my cattle prod?'

‘Wasn't that a joke?' said Hooke, grinning because Merrington had that effect on him, and he was glad.

‘That says a lot.'

‘Ted, I'll get you one.'

Merrington bit again: ‘The statement you sent me was a fine piece of work. My wonderful price for calves wasn't so great after you cut it to ribbons with your costs and deductions and whatever else you chose to whittle it down with.'

‘Just trying to help you, Ted.'

There'd been a load of hardwood planks, Hooke reminded his client, six twenty-kilo bags of Lucky Dog and a galvanised steel wheelbarrow with a pneumatic tyre, top of the range, for which Merrington had overlooked paying since auction day and which Hooke, after the three-month allowance for terms ran out, had taken care of, as Careful Bob used to say, till now.

‘Sharp,' said Merrington, without the trace of a grin.

‘I don't like being touched, Ted.'

Best to make that clear to a man who was hard as they came. Whose sons, it was said, did his bidding or else.

Merrington rocked back on his heels and gave a small uncertain laugh. There came again that almost apologetic appeal in the collapsed body language – the retreat into meekness Hooke remembered after reprimanding him in the yards.

It needed to be said, but made the friendly side of Alan Hooke feel sick and sorry. ‘Come over to the shop for a cuppa?'

‘The legendary old men's club.'

‘Is that what they call it?'

‘Oh, crafty. As if there's something you don't know. It was the first thing I heard when I came onto the Isabel. That you weren't anybody till you'd got pissed with Colts and been tested by Hooke.'

‘Tested?'

‘My flaming oath.'

A car went past, separating them, and when Hooke stepped back onto the road he saw Merrington making his way uphill towards the post office, waving farewell as if nothing uneasy had passed between them, as if soon enough – although not today – he would drop in for that hot drink and friendly yarn.

A fact Hooke knew about people who headed up the hill as if to the post office was that up there, just over the rise, Kinloch United Sandison & Ball pitched for business, no matter how small it was. Could be that Merrington was already taking trade to Kinloch the Farmer's Friend, as the franchiser, new to town, called himself, fitting out the staff in akubras and issuing monogrammed cotton shirts and moleskin trousers to both sexes.

Liz said there must be only one farmer using that lot because of where they put the apostrophe. Hooke liked her loyalty, but noticed his cashflow wobble a bit through the year.

Hooke walked down through the backroom storage shelves and went to the dim windows facing out into the lane. There he coiled cobwebs with his finger and gazed up into the hills at the far end of town. He knew every twist of track and crooked boundary line disputed and argued over since Careful Bob first piggybacked him through the kangaroo grass and showed him the place. A shaft of sunlight passed along the range and the snow showers melted from the far-distant slopes almost as he watched. In the good years of the decade now ending, when snow happened there was constantly the smell of spring in the air, rich and clean, well-watered. Not far off was the excitement of a good flush of feed translating itself into people's wellbeing, interest-only loans, extensions of credit. The depressive cycles of drought were peaked in manic forgetfulness.

There were no cattle prods in stock but Hooke ordered one by express post. As soon as it arrived he threw it on the passenger seat of the Fairlane and drove the fifty minutes to Merrington's Burnside. Walled ivy and attic window crenellations gave the place a lonely touch, as if it could never be brought to life and never had been. Flagstones on the long rose walk echoed in the morning stillness. Nobody was home. Even the dogs were gone. A small flush of green in the driveway wheeltracks showed there'd been nobody home for possibly a week.

When Hooke drove around the back of the house to check the sheds a bunch of cows galloped along the fenceline towards him, just that little bit hungry and wanting a bale of hay. There was hay in the shed though, and Hooke wondered where Merrington had bought it, who he'd bought it from. Seventeen cows meant that Merrington had bought an extra five from somewhere, and paid good money, too, because they weren't cheap anywhere. They hadn't come through Hooke & Hooke, and that thought justified Hooke's taking liberties to find out more.

So with the parcel tucked under his arm he walked down the side of the house looking for a place to leave it, tried the back door, and entered the kitchen with its pots and pans hanging from the ceiling and cricket-pitch length Aga stove and deep square stone washing-up tubs. It was not how Hooke usually did business – donating a long drive to one client alone – unless the favour owed was considerable, and in this case the favour was hardly more than a niggle raised to vague importance. Nor was it like Alan Hooke to go walking through an empty house uninvited. But on he went, nose weaving like a ferret's.

Entering the next room on from the kitchen, a sunroom with southern light, he was drawn to the distinct aroma of turps and oils. The door gave a groan on its hinges. So this was Merrington's retreat, where he dabbled and daubed. A row of cobwebbed skylights revealed racing clouds. An unfinished canvas, perhaps of tree branches, or of skeletonised fingers, or was it bare ribs – it was – stood in the corner. Hooke closed the door on the privacy of what he had seen, a naked someone, still arguing with himself for his boldness. ‘He owes me for the drive,' the calculating part of Hooke rationalised, always a ledger there in the back of the mind. But another thought was that Liz wouldn't stand for being excluded from anything he saw, if it was going to be interesting. The living room walls crammed with those framed oils had Liz wanting to look over the Merringtons' collection in full, the other rooms boasted about and the crates awaiting cracking open from storage. Hooke wouldn't want her excluded, either, as that was a principle of life, and so in his head a small competitive argument with Merrington began. Who was the better man?