Before the dog reached me I could see that the man was not my father. His low growl turned the heeler in its tracks. I stumped up onto the verandah almost faint with relief.
I’m looking for Bob Lang, I said without preamble.
And who would you be, then? asked the old bloke. He had the ruined nose and watery eyes of a dedicated drinker. His hat was a tattered relic of the last world war.
I’m his son.
Honest Bob. And you’re the son.
You know where he is?
The old cove nodded, his lips pursed. In the top pocket of his overalls was a spectacles case which he fished out in order to survey me.
Must look more like yer mother, he muttered.
I shrugged. I felt awkward standing there in my pressed jeans and pullover. The old fella considered my brogues with interest.
You in strife?
No, I answered.
He’s a good bloke is Bob.
I nodded at this to humour the old bugger and because I knew it to be true, but acknowledging it was painful.
The old bloke hauled himself up with a scrape of boots on the boards and opened the screen door. As he went in he flung the door back for my benefit and I followed him into a hall-like room that seemed to be emporium, public bar and community hall.
This your pub? I said taking it in.
Nup. Live out the back. Thommo’s day orf.
At the bar he took up a blank pad and the stub of a pencil whose lead he licked before drawing me a map and a route out to a destination he labelled BOB’S CAMP.
Bob the Banker, he said tearing the page off and passing it to me. There he is.
And this is us here?
That’s us.
I straightened up and looked at the rows of bottles behind the bar. It occurred to me that it might be useful to arrive with supplies. I felt the bloke watching me and I don’t know whether it was his undisguised interest or the bitterness I felt at having even to contemplate such a thing after all my mother had been through, but I decided against taking any booze, and so great was my relief at the decision that as I folded up his helpful scrap of paper I thought I saw a flicker of respect in the other man’s gaze, the afterglow of which lasted all the way to the car.
I drove on up the thin black road awhile until I found the dirt turnoff indicated by the pencil map. The track was broad but muddy from the recent rains and when I turned into it the car felt sluggish and skittish by turns. I really had to concentrate to keep from sliding off into the scrub. Out here the earth was red, almost purple. Set against it, the flesh-coloured eucalypts and the grey-blue saltbush seemed so high-keyed they looked artificial. I had expected a desert vista, something rocky and open with distant horizons, but this woodland, with its quartzy mullock heaps and small trees, was almost claustrophobic. Mud clapped against the chassis and wheel arches. When I hit puddles, great red sheets of water sluiced the windscreen. Wrestling the wheel, I drove for half an hour until I came to a junction marked with a doorless fridge. It corresponded to my pencil map; I turned north. Five minutes later I turned off onto a slippery, rutted track that ended in a four-way fork. After some hesitation I took the most northerly trail and drove slowly through old diggings and the pale blocks of fallen walls. The car wallowed through shimmering puddles and the track narrowed until saltbush glissed against the doors.
I’d begun to sweat and curse and look for some way of turning back when I saw the dull tin roof and the rusted stub of a windmill amongst the salmon gums. A dog began to bark. I eased into the clearing where a jumble of makeshift buildings and car bodies was scattered, and the moment I saw the man striding from the trees beyond, I knew it was him. I stalled the car and did not start it again. I was dimly aware of the dog crashing against the door, pressing itself across the glass at my shoulder. It really was the old man. He was taller than I remembered and I was startled by the way he carried himself, the unexpected dignity of him. All my manly determination deserted me. I uttered a shameful little o! of surprise. It was all I could do to unstrap myself and lurch out of the vehicle so as not to be sitting when he arrived. The dog clambered at my legs, but at the old man’s piercing whistle it desisted and ran to his side. For fear of looking fastidious I refrained from brushing the muddy pawprints from my jumper and jeans. I sat on the speckled hood of the car, folding and unfolding my arms. He came on through the waist-high saltbush, and when he reached me and the red dog sat as instructed, I saw that he was sober. I saw the wattles of his neck, the sun-lesions on his arms, the black filaments of work in his hands and the braces that held up his pants. He wore an ancient jungle hat, a faded work shirt and steel-capped boots more scarred than his long, melancholy face. His eyes were startled but clear.
Is it your mother?
Yes, I said.
What do you need?
She wants to see you.
He looked past me then and took a long breath. The dog whined and watched him.
You better come in. If you want to.
Will you come? I asked, angry at how sick with love I was at the very sight of him.
Of course, he murmured. If she asked.
She asked.
I have to . . . I need to organize myself.
How long will it take?
I have to think.
It’s a long drive.
You’ll need a cup of tea.
He turned toward the dwelling and I followed him. By the time I reached the cement slab of his verandah my brogues were ruined. He directed me to an armchair beneath the sagging tin roof where I kicked off the shoes. I felt strangely short of breath and when I followed him indoors I was unprepared for how strongly the shack smelled of him. It was not an unpleasant odour, that mix of shaving soap, leathery skin and sweat, but the sudden familiarity of it overwhelmed me. It was the scent of a lost time, how my father smelled before the funk of antacids and the peppermints that never quite hid the stink of booze. I nearly fell into the wooden chair he pulled out for me. While he stoked up the old Metters stove and set the blackened kettle on it I tried to compose myself.
The shack was a one-room bushpole construction with a corrugated iron roof and walls. In three walls were mismatched timber windows whose panes were scrubbed clean. At one end stood an iron bed and a rough bookshelf and at the other was the wood stove set back in its tin fireplace. Between them where I sat was a deal table and two chairs. Black billies and pots hung from a wall. A steel sink was set into a jarrah frame. The hand-poured cement floor was swept. There were photographs of my mother and me above the bed and one of him in uniform. I felt him watch as I took them in. Myself at fourteen, all teeth and hair and hope. And my mother in her thirties, smiling and confident.
And Kerry? I asked despite myself.
The old man pointed back to the doorway where, above the lintel, a faded shot of my dead sister hung like an icon. A chubby toddler in a red jumpsuit.
How long have you lived like this?
Sober? he said, misunderstanding me. Fifteen years.
Fifteen years, I said.
He clamped his jaw and looked down but there was an involuntary pride in his posture as I repeated his words.
I have to see to things. Before I go.
Okay.
It’s too dangerous driving back in the dark, he said. There’ll be roos all over the road. Can you wait till morning?
I had hoped to head back today, I said, realizing as I did so that if we left now we wouldn’t reach the city until the early hours. After last night Mum would be in no fit state and the drive was probably beyond me.
You’re welcome to stay here. But there’s rooms back at the pub if you’d rather not.
I’ll stay, I said after something of a pause.
The kettle boiled. He made tea and cut up some damper. We sat a while blowing steam – he from his tin mug and me from the china cup he’d given me. I tried the damper with the butter he brought in from the kero fridge and it was good.
You coming like this, h
e said. It’s . . .
It’s sudden, I said.
He nodded sadly as though that was not what he’d been about to say.
How do you live? I asked.
Don’t need much out here. Get the pension. I look after things, hold things for people.
Bob the Banker, I said trying not to sound ironic.
Yeah.
What things?
Oh, money. Gold. Valuables.
What people?
There’s a few blokes here and there still prospecting. Some of them just pretending these days. Often as not just drinking or going off their rockers and lying low. Old sandalwooders, fettlers, some strays and runaways. Don’t trust each other. Don’t trust emselves anymore. So they leave stuff with me.
They trust you, then.
Yes.
Why you?
The question affronted him but the old man seemed determined not to take offence.
Well, because I don’t drink. Because . . . because I’m trustworthy.
Honest Bob, I murmured, ashamed at the bitterness in my voice. But it was hard to sit there and see him after so long, in the wake of such disappointment and creeping shame. I’d had years of boyhood bewilderment and then, once I was old enough to see it, a decade of fury at how my mother suffered. In the end there was only a closed-down resignation, the adult making-do that I’d grown into. And now I had to sit with him and hear him declare himself trustworthy.
Once upon a time it had been true. Honest Bob. He was straight as a die and what you saw was what you got. I believed in him. He was Godlike. His fall from grace was so slow as to be imperceptible, a long puzzling decline. Even during that time he was never rough or deliberately unkind. If he had been it would have been easier to shut off from him. He just disappeared by degrees before our eyes, subsiding into a secret disillusionment I never understood, hiding the drink from my mother who, when she discovered it, hid it from me in turn for fear I would lose respect for him. She turned herself inside out to protect him and then me. And at such cost. All for nothing. He ran away. Left us. I grew up in a hurry.
I was, my wife says, an old man at twenty-five. I felt poisoned by lies. So many subtle tiny doses over the years that something in me gave out. I was no longer capable of forgiveness. If Gail, my wife, hadn’t come along, I wonder what would have become of me. She has such a capacity to forgive. I doubt I could have reinvented myself by sheer force of will, though that would be my natural tendency. I have stumbled upon a good life. But my mother was too stubborn, too loyal, to move on. And now she was dying in that same state, fierce with hopeless love, and I was a breath away from screaming it all back in the old man’s face.
He drank his tea and the afternoon light slanted across the table between us. After a time he cleared his throat.
I have to see some people, he murmured. Before I leave. In case there’s any misunderstanding.
You want me to drive you?
Well, it would be quicker. It’s too mucky for the pushbike.
Alright, then. We’ll go now.
He brought me an old pair of Blundstones. They were soft with use and felt strange on my feet. The insoles were indented by his toes and sunk at the heel. We left the dog behind and slewed up muddy tracks for an hour or more, stopping well clear of humpies and dongas in the long shadows of diggings and ruins while the old man went in to consult people who were never more than silhouettes to my eye. Their dwellings were scraptin and ragwall. One bloke lived in an orange school bus that had sprouted lean-tos and outbuildings. While my father was in the bus with him I walked out through trenches and disused shafts to an abandoned hut. I was fed up waiting in the car, and the old place had caught my eye. On the dirt floor was a rusty bedstead. The hessian lining of the walls had come away to pool on the dirt. The single room was stacked with empty bottles and the tin fireplace was overflowing with ash that had set white and hard in the rain. On one bare pole a postcard was tacked. It featured a map of the state with the word SECEDE! superimposed on it in faded yellow. A man’s pants hung rotting on a chair. I’d been in some desolate rooms in my time but I never saw anything so melancholy.
We finished our rounds at dusk. I was completely lost and only my father’s directions got us home.
You hear about the royal commission? I asked as I drove.
Someone said it was on.
All their names are in code.
The old man said nothing.
You’re not curious?
It’s a long time ago, he murmured. It’s a shame to get this car dirty.
When we reached his place the dog came hurtling from the dark, sudden as memory.
The night was surprisingly cold. It took some time for the stove to warm the room to the point where it was comfortable, but when it was we sat in the light of two hurricane lamps and ate the stew the old man ladled from a cast-iron pot.
This is good, I said.
Goat, he murmured.
You shoot them? I couldn’t help but smile.
Now and then. What? he asked.
Nothing, I said. It’s just like . . . I dunno . . . stepping back in time. Out here, I mean.
He shook his head, said nothing.
The smell of that wood, I said. What is it?
Desert pine.
Smells like cypress.
He nodded.
The Yanks have taken Baghdad.
I don’t have an opinion on it.
Fair enough.
We ate in silence for a time. The dog sprawled before the stove swooning in the warmth.
I hear you’re a lawyer now.
Yeah.
What kind?
Industrial relations.
On whose side?
The little bloke.
That’s good, he said. That’s good. Gotta look after the little bloke.
Well, that’s the theory.
He pushed his plate away and sat back.
Your mother, he said. She’s sick?
Yes.
He closed his eyes a moment and nodded and it struck me that he was disappointed, hurt even.
How sick?
She’s dying.
He sighed and looked at his hands. He shook his head sadly. He looked at the dog.
Well. It . . . it hasn’t been for nothing then.
What hasn’t?
Sobering up. I couldn’t have gone drunk.
I don’t think she cares anymore, I said bitterly.
I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have gone drunk.
That’s irrelevant.
I wouldn’t have gone, he said with feeling. It’s not irrelevant to me.
Jesus, you’ve been dry fifteen years anyway, it turns out.
Every day. Every day in readiness.
For what, seeing her?
Not seeing her. Facing her.
I sighed in exasperation.
Even another fifteen years would have been worth the wait.
It’s not really about you, I said. I’m doing it for her.
I know that, he said hotly. But who’s she doing it for?
I’m buggered if I know, I said in disgust, but even as I said it I realized what it was. This whole expedition. It was her way of bringing the two of us face to face.
Have you written to her?
Not since I’ve been straight.
Why not?
He shrugged. Shame, I spose. And I didn’t want to get in her way.
She’s still married to you!
So I believe.
I sighed. It’s good that you’re sober.
I’m proud of it, he murmured, with tears in his eyes. You won’t understand. But it’s all I have.
I sat there and hated myself, hated him too for making me the dour bastard I am, forged in shame and disappointment, consoled only by order. Childless. Resigned.
I’m sorry, he said, wiping his face. I wish I could undo it.
But you can’t.
No.
So what the hell was it, Dad?
I lost my way, he said.
Yes, well, we’re across that already. You lost your way and we all got lost with you. But you never said. You’d never tell us. It’s like this cloud, this dark thing had found you and you wouldn’t say what it was. The job. There was something you did.
No, he said. Is that what you think? You think I’m sitting here waiting to be named in the inquiry?
I’ve wondered, I said without pleasure. I’m sorry.
I saw things, he said miserably. Well, I half saw things. Things I didn’t really understand at the time. Don’t even really understand now. But it was the surprise of it, knowing that I was on the outside. It was like wheels within wheels and once I sniffed something crook I saw there was no one safe to tell. I was stuck, stranded.
Nobody at all?
For a while I thought I was going nuts, he murmured, his face turned from the murky lamplight. Didn’t trust myself. Thought I was imagining it. But then there was this kid I remember. Smalltime petty crim. Had his legs broken out on Thunder Beach. You remember that place?
I nodded. I remembered the beach vividly and now I knew who he was talking about.
People said he got into a car with detectives, I said. That same afternoon.
That’s it, said the old man. Two of the demons were down from the city.
What was it about?
Drugs, I spose. Never really understood it. Just that he’d fallen foul of em. And any question, any witness account died on the vine, didn’t matter who it came to. Felt like, whatever was going on I was the only bloke not in on it. And the city blokes were in on it; it was bigger than that little town, that’s for sure. So who do you talk to? Even if you’ve got the balls, who can you trust? It ate me alive. Ulcers, everything. I should have quit but I didn’t even have the courage to do that. Would have saved us all a lot of pain. But it’s all I ever wanted to do, you see, be a cop. And I hung on till there was nothing left of me, nothing left of any of us. Cowardice, it’s a way of life. It’s not natural, you learn it.
He got up and collected the plates and cutlery. He took a lamp from the table and hung it on the wall over the sink where he tipped in water from the kettle. With his back to me and his head down in the rising steam he looked like a figure from another time, a woodcutter from a fairytale, a stranger without a face, an idea as much as a man. I wanted to get up and help but I sat there behind him while the stove clucked and hissed and the dog snored.