There was no justifiable reason for me to be angry about potential buyers except that the timing was bad and, fuck it, I did not like them sticking their nose in my business or presuming to judge my painting or my housekeeping. But I, the previously famous artist, was now the caretaker so, having forced myself back into my cold and unpleasantly resistant clothes, I slopped slowly through the mud to the shed where I fired up the tractor. It was a Fiat and although its noisy differential had rapidly damaged my hearing, I retained a ridiculous affection for the yellow beast. Perched high upon its back, as ridiculous in my own way as Don Quixote, I headed out towards my stranded visitor.
On a better day I might have seen the Dorrigo escarpment towering three thousand feet above the car, mist rising out of the ancient unlogged bush, newborn clouds riding high in powerful thermals which any glider pilot would feel in the pit of his stomach, but now the mountains were hidden, and I could see no more than my fence line and the invading headlights. The windows of the Ford were fogged so even at the distance of ten yards I could make out no more of the interior than the outlines of the AVIS tag on the rearview mirror. This was confirmation enough that the person was a buyer and I prepared myself to be polite in the face of arrogance. I do, however, have a tendency to bristle and when no-one emerged from the car to greet me, I began to wonder what Sydney fuck thought he could block my distinguished driveway and then wait for me to serve him. I dismounted and thumped my fist on the roof.
Nothing happened for almost a minute. Then the engine fired and the foggy window descended to unveil a woman in her early thirties with straw-coloured hair.
“Are you Mr. Boylan?” She had a strange accent.
“No,” I said. She had almond eyes, lips almost too large for her slender face. She appeared unusual, but very attractive, so it is strange, you might think—given my miserable existence and almost continual horniness—how powerfully and deeply she irritated me.
She looked out the window, surveying the front and back wheels which she had spun deep into my land.
“I’m not dressed for this,” she said.
If she had apologised perhaps I would have reacted differently, but she actually rolled the windows up and shouted instructions at me from the other side.
Well, I had been famous once but now I was just a dogsbody, so what did I expect? I wrapped the free end of the Fiat’s cable around the Ford’s back axle, an exercise which covered me with mud and perhaps a little cow shit too. Then, returning to my tractor, I dropped it into low ratio and hit the gas. Of course she had left the car in gear so this maneuver created two long streaks across the grass and out onto the road.
I saw no reason to say good-bye. I retrieved the cable from the Ford and drove back to the shed without looking over my shoulder.
As I returned to my studio I saw she had not gone at all but was walking across the paddock, high heels in her hand, towards my house.
This was the hour at which I normally drew and as my visitor approached I sharpened up my pencils. The river was roaring like blood in my ears but I could feel her feet as she came up the hardwood stairs, a kind of fluttering across the floor joists.
I heard her call but when neither Hugh nor I responded she set off along the covered walkway suspended between house and studio, a whippy ticklish little structure some ten feet above the ground. She might have chosen to knock on the studio door, but there was also a very narrow walkway, a kind of gangplank which snaked around the outer wall of the studio and so she appeared in front of the open lube-bay door, standing outside the silk, the river at her back.
“Sorry, it’s me again.”
I affected great concentration on my pencils.
“Can I use your phone?”
At that moment the electricity returned, flooding the studio with bright light. There stood a slender blonde woman behind a veil of stocking silk. She had mud up to her pretty calves.
“Strong work,” she said.
“You can’t come in.”
“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t track mud into a studio.”
Only later did I think how few civilians would have put it quite like that. At the time I was concerned with simpler things: that she had not come to buy the property, that she was exceedingly attractive and in need of help. I led her back across the walkway to Jean-Paul’s “house of few possessions” where the only real room was a central kitchen with a square table made from Tasmanian blackwood which I was required—his final instruction—to scrub each morning. The table had more character than when Jean-Paul last saw it—cadmium yellow, crimson rose, curry, wine, beef fat, clay—over a month of domestic life now partially obscured by a huge harvest of pumpkins and zucchinis amongst which I now finally located the telephone.
“No dial tone,” I said. “I’m sure they’re working on it.”
Hugh began stirring in his room. I remembered that his dog had drowned. It had completely slipped my mind.
My visitor had remained on the other side of the flywire door. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can see you have more important things to worry about.” She was drenched, her short yellow hair all matted, like a little chicken saved from drowning.
I opened the door.
“We are used to mud in this part of the house,” I said. She hesitated, shivering. She looked like she should be put in a little cardboard box before the fire.
“Perhaps you’d like some dry clothes and a warm shower?”
She could not have known what a peculiarly intimate thing I was offering. You see, Jean-Paul’s bathroom was on the back porch and here we hairy men were used to showering, almost alfresco, with nothing but flywire separating us from the roaring river, the bending trees. It was easily the best part of our exile. Once we were clean we would climb into that big Japanese wooden tub where the hot water cooked us as red as crayfish while, on a day like today at least, the rain beat across our faces.
On the public side, by the open stairs—really just a fire escape—there were canvas blinds and these I now lowered. I gave her our one clean towel, a dry shirt, a sarong.
“If you use the tub,” I said, “you can’t use soap in it.”
“Domo arigato,” she called. “I know how to behave.”
Domo arigato? It would be six months before I would learn what that might mean. I was thinking I should have told Hugh about the damn puppy, but I did not need his outbursts now. I returned to my table full of pumpkins and sat, quiet as a mouse, on the noisy chair. She was looking for Dozy Boylan—who else? There were no other Boylans, and I knew she would have no hope of driving her rent-a-car across his flooded creek. I began to think about what I could cook for dinner.
Having no desire to set off Hugh, I remained silently at the table while she bathed. I rose only once, to fetch a cloth and some moisturising cream and with this I began to clean her Manolo Blahniks. Who would have believed me? I must have paid for two dozen pairs in the last year of my marriage, but this was the first time I had actually touched a pair and I was shocked by the indecent softness of the leather. The wood shifted and crackled in the firebox of the Rayburn stove. If I have made myself sound calculating, let me tell you: I had not the least fucking idea what I was doing.
2
Hearing the screen door in the bathroom give a small urgent “thwack,” I hid the shoes beneath the table and hurried around collecting muddy pumpkins, stacking them out on the front porch. Not that I didn’t notice her enter, or see my Kmart shirt falling loosely from her slender shoulders, the collar’s soft grey shadow across her bath-pink neck.
I handed her the cordless phone. “Telecom are back in service.” Brusque. It has been remarked of me before—the lack of charm when sober.
“Oh super,” she said.
She threw her towel across a wooden chair and walked briskly out onto the front porch. Above the insistent thrum on the roof I could hear the soft American burr which I understood as old money, East Coast, but all this was Aussie expertise i.e. from the movies and I h
ad not the least idea of who she was, and if she had been Hilda the Poisoner from Spoon Forks, North Dakota, I would have had no clue.
I began to chop up a big pumpkin, a lovely thing, fire orange with a rust brown speckle, and a moist secret cache of bright slippery seeds which I scooped into the compost tray.
Out on the porch, I heard her: “Right. Yes. Exactly. Bye.”
She returned, all antsy, rubbing at her hair.
“He says his creek is over the big rock.” (She pronounced it “crick.”) “He says you’ll understand.”
“It means you wait for the ‘crick’ to go down.”
“I can’t wait,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
It was exactly at that moment—well I’m fucking sorry Miss, but what do you want me to do about the flood?—that Hugh’s adenoidal breathing pushed its way between us. Doughy, six foot four, filthy, dangerous-looking, he filled the doorway without explanation. He had his pants on, but his hair looked like cattle had been eating it and he was unshaven. Our guest was three feet in front of him but it was to me he spoke. “Where’s the bloody pup?”
I was at the far side of the stove, hands slippery with olive oil, laying the pumpkin and potato in a baking tray.
“This is Hugh,” I said. “My brother.”
Hugh looked her up and down, very Hugh-like, threatening if you did not know.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Marlene.”
“Have you,” he enquired, sticking out his fat lower lip, and folding his big arms across his chest, “read the book The Magic Pudding?”
Oh Christ, I thought, not this.
She rubbed her hair again. “As a matter of fact, Hugh, I have read The Magic Pudding. Twice.”
“Are you American?”
“That’s very hard to say.”
“Hard to say.” His self-inflicted haircut was high above his ears suggesting a fierce and rather monkish kind of character. “But you have read The Magic Pudding?”
Now she offered all of her attention. “Yes. Yes, I have.”
Hugh gave me a fast look. I understood exactly—he would now be busy for a moment, but he had not forgotten this business with the dog.
“Who,” he asked, turning his brown eyes to the foreigner, “do you like the best in The Magic Pudding?”
And she was charmed. “I like the four of them.”
“Really?” He was dubious. “Four?”
“Including the pudding.”
“You’re counting the pudding!”
“But I like all the drawings.” She finally returned the phone to the table and began to properly dry her hair. “The pudding thieves,” she said, “are priceless.”
“Is that a joke you’re telling?” My brother hated the pudding thieves. He was continually, loudly, passionately regretful that it was not possible for him to punch the possum on the snout.
“It’s not the characters I like”—she paused—“but the drawings—I think they’re better than any painting Lindsay ever did.”
“Oh yes,” said Hugh, softening. “We saw Lindsay’s bloody paintings. Bless me.”
Whatever urgent business had been in her mind, she put it briefly to one side. “Do you want to know my favourite person in The Magic Pudding?”
“Yes.”
“Sam Sawnoff”
“He’s not a person.”
“Yes, he’s a penguin, but he’s very good, I think.”
And there she was—a type—one of those rare, often unlucky people who “get on with Hugh.”
“Who do you like?” she asked, smiling.
“Barnacle Bill!” he cried exultantly. And next thing he was out of the doorway, shadowboxing, prancing round the table crying: “Mitts up, mitts up, you dirty pudding thieves!”
Jean-Paul’s little house of few possessions was, as I said, a light and whippy structure, designed with no anticipation of hulking prancing men in muddy work boots. The cups and saucers rattled on their shelves. None of this seemed to put her out at all. Hugh put his arm around my chest. Misunderstanding, she continued smiling.
“Where’s my bloody dog?” my brother hissed.
Up close like this, his breath was really awful.
“Later, Hugh.”
“Shut up.” There was the missing front tooth and all that tartar but since Dr. Hoffman was deported, there was no dentist brave enough to tackle Hugh.
“Later, please.”
But he was hard against my back, with his whiskery jowls against my cheek. He was a strong man of thirty-four and when he moved his huge arm around my throat I could hardly breathe.
“Your puppy drowned.”
I saw my visitor suck in her breath.
“It drowned, mate,” I said.
He let go his grip but I watched him very closely. Our Hugh could be a devious chap and I didn’t want to cop that famous roundhouse punch.
He stepped back, stricken, and that really was my prime concern, to get beyond his reach.
“Careful of the bath heater,” I said, but he had already stumbled, sat on it, cried with pain, and rushed head down into his room.
Singed feathers, I thought, recalling the rooster in The Magic Pudding.
Moaning, Hugh slammed his door. He threw himself onto his bed and as the house shook and rattled the visitor’s clear blue eyes widened. How could I explain? All my brother’s misery was painfully present and nothing could be said in private.
“Can I walk across the creek?” she asked.
Five minutes later we were out in the storm together.
The tractor headlights were weak and the ride very loud and rough, no more than 20 Ks, but the wind was off the escarpment and the rain stung my face and doubtless hers as well. She had borrowed my oilskin coat and a pair of gum boots but her hair would, by now, be wild and curling, her eyes slitted against the rain.
For the first mile and a half, that is, all the way to Dozy Boylan’s cattle grid, I was very aware of that slender body, the small breasts against my back. I was half mad, you see that, a dangerous male in rut, in a fury with my brother, roaring around Loop Road, the slasher swaying and rattling, the differential whining in my ears.
As we arrived at the grid, my weak yellow lights fell upon the boiling water of Sweetwater Creek, more usually a narrow stream. Jean-Paul’s big slasher—what I would call a mower—was attached to the power takeoff and three-point hydraulics. I raised it as high as it would go, a big square raft of metal about six foot by six foot. I should have removed it, but I was a painter and in matters agricultural my judgment was bad in almost every way imaginable. I had it firmly in my mind that the little creek was nothing serious but entering the flood my boots were immediately filled with cold water and then it was too late, and the Fiat was rising and stumbling across the hidden rocks. Then the current caught the slasher and I felt a sick surge in my gut as we began to drift. I steered upstream, of course, but the tractor was slipping down, lumbering over the boulders, front wheels rearing in the air. I was no farmer, never had been. The mower was a deadly orange barge riding on the surface of the flood. I could feel my passenger’s terror as she dug into my shoulders and saw clearly, angrily, what a complete fool I was. I had put my life at risk, for what? I did not even like her.
Bless us, as Hugh would say.
Luck or God being with us, we emerged on the far bank and I lowered the mower for the journey up Dozy’s steep drive. Marlene said nothing, but when we arrived at the front door, when Dozy came out to greet her, she shed my raincoat, urgently, desperately, as if she never wished it to touch her again. I had no doubt she was afraid, and in the tangled skin she handed me I imagined I could feel her anger with my recklessness.
“You better take that slasher off,” said Dozy. “I’ll babysit it for a day or two.”
Dozy was a rich and successful manufacturer who had, with all the energy and will that marked his character, turned himself into a broad sixty-year-old man with a grey moustache and a strong farmer’s bel
ly. He was also a gifted amateur entomologist, but that was not the point right now, and as his guest took refuge inside his house he fetched a fierce flashlight and held it silently while I disconnected the mower from the hydraulics.
“Hugh alone?”
“I’ll be back soon.”
My friend said nothing judgmental, but he caused me to imagine Hugh howling across paddocks, barbed wire in the dark, rabbit holes, the river, his terror that I was dead and he was left alone.
“I would have got her in the Land Rover,” Dozy said, “but she was in a great awful rush and I was listening to the BBC news.”
He said nothing about her attractiveness, leading me to conclude that she was one of the nieces or grandchildren he had spread out across the world.
“I’m fine now.” And I was, in a way. I would go home and feed Hugh, tune in his wireless, and make sure he took his bloody tablet. Then we would talk about his dog.
Once, not so long ago, I had been a happy married man tucking in his boy at night.
3
Phthaaa! We are Bones, God help us, raised in sawdust, dry each morning. I am called Hugh and he is called Butcher but the pair of us are meat men, not river men, not beggars hiding in damp shacks with floods and mud and mould, with a hook hanging from the front verandah to skin the eels. We were born and bred in Bacchus Marsh, thirty-three miles west of Melbourne, down Anthony’s Cutting. If you are expecting a bog or marsh, there is none, it is just a way of speaking, making no more sense than if the town were named Mount Bacchus. The Marsh was a big old teasing town, four thousand people in those days before the PRODUCT MANAGERS came to live. We had a tease for everyone. On New Year’s Eve the BODGIES and the WIDGIES would throw eggs at the barber’s windows and write in whitewash on the road. My dad woke up one New Year’s Day to discover someone had changed the sign above the shop from BOONE to BO NES. We were Bones thereafter. BO NES BUTCHERS.
All in that town were FULL OF HIGH SPIRITS like Sam Sawnoff in the book The Magic Pudding.
Like Barnacle Bill and Sam Sawnoff we always fought and wrestled. Bless us. I wrestled with my dad and my granddad as did Brother Butcher Bones, a big man if not the biggest. He could not stand to lose to me. God save us what a bag of tricks he had to use Full Nelson. Half Nelson. Chinese Burn. I did not grudge him, never. Wrestling was the best thing any day. Many the time in the sawdust we did the old charge and grab the knackers, blood is thicker than water as they say. This was long ago but we were all large men, none but Granddad larger than myself. When he was seventy-two he had a disagreement with 35-yr-old Nails Carpenter dropping him on his bum in the public bar of the Royal Hotel. Carpenter played RUCK for Bacchus Marsh but would never return to that WATERING HOLE not even when Granddad was safely dead and buried up at Bacchus Marsh cemetery, butcher’s grass around the hole, so clean you could have displayed loin chops along the edge. Not even then would Nails return to the Royal although his old mates would barrack him from the doorway, come in, come in, we will shout you a shandy. Nails dropped dead in 1956 while pedaling up the Stanford Hill.