A Woman of the Inner Sea (19 page)

—I understand, he said in an ironic way. In his general delivery, he had mixed objectives: sometimes he desired to sound like a cop, sometimes like a company law barrister. He was trying for the barrister tone now.

It came to her again that of course he would tell everyone where she was now. They would all come after her. Worst of all, her solicitous parents. So that perhaps all she wanted through her stratagems was one more night numbly embayed in Jelly’s plentiful, radiant flesh, another evening to practice the two-pour schooner, another chance of the perfect marsupial dream.

Burnside. Capable of driving a few hours down the highway and catching a plane, of getting back to the place where people would ask, How was your visit to the bush? She had prevented that. He would stay, with his envelope full of consent forms which Kate would likely sign in the morning, and he would be thickened a little, coarsened by Shirl’s spuds molten with butter and by plentiful custard. Given that, Kate thought, something might happen.

Since it was a night so blinded by rain that the police might have stayed home, Jelly took the risk of driving them home to his place.

It was vastly cold, the way a town in the plains can be. Jelly was sure the police would not be out tonight with their little breath kits.

He wanted to know, Who was that big bugger?

—Burnside. My husband sent him.

—What with?

—Divorce papers.

Closing one eye, he measured the significance of this.

As he drove, he kept saying, This could develop. Jesus, this could develop.

The rain he meant. Myambagh’s streets looked negligible beneath it.

—They’re all under their little iron roofs, murmured Jelly, and he stared out as if considering counting the thick beads.

Without asking more about Burnside when they got home, he slept for an hour in the dark. But she didn’t. She enjoyed his bulk beside her. It still glowered from the night’s intake of rum. When she woke him, he stirred in an uncomplaining way.

He said, Jesus, what in the bloody hell?

But these were purely token sentiments. In Jelly, genuine anger seemed to have been choked out by temperament, weight and history.

—What in the bloody hell?

—I want to put on the light, Jelly.

—Light?

Unlike city people, those in Myambagh were very particular about turning on lights at inappropriate hours. She noticed that they kept their houses black all night. No light burned in the Railway Hotel either, not even to deter a thief. The grandparents of the Myambagh people had seen the coming of electricity to the town’s hearths. And a tribal memory told them, in the meat of the night, not to be flippant with light.

—The way it’s raining, she explained, there might be a power failure later. I want to show you something, Jelly. While there’s still power.

There was one bulb in the room, the overhead one. The bedside lamp she’d seen on her first visit was empty. No prodigality in Jelly’s world. One source. One light.

She found the shoulder bag she brought to Jelly’s every night and took her wallet from it. She knew the photograph was in there, though she had not looked at it since the catastrophe. She knew the picture would put the question and evince a guilty plea from her.

—There you are.

When she became the different woman, of course she would be able to look at the thing and meet their soft hopeful demand. She might even find tears, and be average maudlin at their faces.

She extracted the picture from the back pocket of the wallet and offered it to Jelly as the rain scarified his metal roof.

—Those are my children.

Taking the picture, Jelly shook his head to jolt his vision into the right mode—inquisitive, respectful, ready with the apt word of praise.

—I’ve lost them.

—Lost them? Their father take them away?

—Yes.

—Jesus. Why’d he do that?

—He argued he was a fitter person. His mother argued that too.

—Jesus.

After thought and still looking at the picture, he said, Lovely kids. I know there couldn’t’ve been any cruelty, not with you.

—He said there was.

She told him that just to end the story.

—But I bet there wasn’t. Was there?

—Nothing deliberate.

She saw him frown. He wanted the simpler answer, the motherly reassurance. She took the picture back out of his hands whether he was ready or not, replaced it, put the wallet back in her bag, and then went and switched off Jelly’s melancholy light.

In the darkness, Jelly said, I don’t know what to say, Kate.

But by his voice, he intended to go into the subject. She got in beside him. He felt deeply warm, but the surface of his flesh was cold.

—Don’t start talking.

Her lips brushed something facial.

—But, listen …

—What were you going to say, anyhow? Something that would fix everything up?

—Jesus. I have a hard time fixing a fuse.

—There you are. Shut up then.

And indeed he seemed grateful to be acquitted of the task.

—Send her down, Hughy! he murmured on the edge of sleep.

An imprecation to the Australian god of weather, the god both of drought and of swollen streams. A prayer to the god of downpour from the god of the bar.

When she woke again, the light was gray-blue in the room. The rain was still in the same high voice. She was cold. Jelly had left her, and she had never been in his bed alone. She saw that he stood across the room, sighing his way into an enormous pair of waders.

—Jesus, I’ll look like Donald Duck in these. You didn’t hear the knocking at the door, eh? The sodding river’s over its banks, and there’s a tide of water on its way cross-country from Narromine. I’m signed up as an evacuation official. They need me on the books
over at the old Palais Theatre. The Palais’s built up a bit high, you know. Sorry, love.

She smiled at the curiosity of it: that he did her the courtesy of speaking like an ordinary lover, one who had a normal duty to rest at the beloved’s side till dawn at least.

—You ought to get back to Jack, he said. I bet in no time they’ll have you out at the racecourse filling sandbags.

He had negotiated himself into the waders at last. He looked slick and authoritative now, liberated from his daily duty as pensioner and servant of the bar. A temporary rescuer, and looking like it! She could visualize him saying to an old lady, Don’t worry about the house or the dog, love. Water mightn’t even get over the doorstep. Take this cup of tea, and the helicopter will be here any second.

—There’s something I want you to do, Kate. If I bring the stuff in here, I want you to take it over to Jack’s.

She looked at him a time, not knowing what stuff he meant. He thought her solemnity meant agreement and was gone before she could ask.

She began to dress, and was into her shoes, which were still wet from the night before, when he came in slicked with rain and carrying a small Esky, the standard accouterment of picnics as enjoyed by
homo australiensis
.

Jelly was gasping somewhat in his glittering rain gear.

—It’s not volatile, he assured her.

—You’ve got dynamite? You’ve really got it?

—Jesus, of course I bloody have, Kate. I
told
you.

He picked the Esky up again and did a demonstration of carrying it for her, creeping across the room and placing the thing softly on the bed.

—Carry it by the handle, see. You could drop it without any problem, but better not. The detonators are in there too, safe as you like. Wrapped up in foil. The blasting box I’ll bring later. In this downpour, I don’t want to overburden you, love.

—And where do I take it?

—Oh. Sorry. When you get to the Railway, you know upstairs? A whole walled-off section they open up in what they call civil emergencies. Just put it in there. Tell Jack. He won’t mind. I’ll be along later in the day.

Kate touched the handle experimentally. He thought she was terrified of the potential detonation still, so he explained further.

—See, if I leave it out the back it’ll get drowned. Once it gets wet, you have to ask the police and the bloody army in to dispose of it.

He shook his head at the prospect. It was intolerable that his mission should close with such low comedy.

—I’m not worried, she told him.

Though she did want to live long enough to sign the Kozinskis away, and to see Burnside move out into an air blinded with rain.

Kate settled into her wet shoes now, ready to go. Not washed or rinsed, she presumed the day itself would look after that.

She lifted the Esky and found that it felt quite natural. Carrying it, she followed Jelly into the corridor. The front door was juddering in the wind. Jelly turned to her, a yellow frog king.

—That big bugger, said Jelly, a big bugger himself in some ways. The inquiry agent?

—Yes.

—All this flooding … he might get stuck here now.

—Damn him.

—Yes, said Jelly precisely and delicately. In fact he broke the word neatly off the body of language in a way he rarely did. It might be a sign that he was not finished with serious advice.

—Look, I’ve been meaning to say. You can’t just expect to disappear, you know. It’s not just enough to come to some dead place like Myambagh. I saw posters for you. Your family has put up posters all over the place. They decided not to call you a missing person, but they sent a poster to every police station. A photograph. Asking them to be so kind as to put them up at the Town Hall and the Post Office … A friend of mine who’s in the police here brought them to me and says,
Isn’t this your friend?
And I say, Yes it is. And he asked me if I think you want these posters put up. And I say I reckon you don’t. He knows you’ve got no record, because he checked. So he just gave the posters to me and I disposed of them. There are pictures of you hanging all over New South Wales, except in Myambagh. Myambagh always wanted a distinction of its own, apart from floods. Well, this is it. The only bloody place with a council chambers that doesn’t have your picture. Imagine!

She felt flushed with gratitude, though, and it was partly to herself. She had chosen her protector so infallibly.

The timidity she’d harbored about carrying dynamite across Myambagh vanished now. She imagined the detonators neatly packaged away from the explosive. The two lovingly insulated from one another. Instruments of high office.

Jelly left ahead of her, lumbering away into the murk. She had dropped the Esky to cling to him for a while before he left, and he’d said, Thank my friend the copper. He’s took a bit of a risk. Though I suppose he could always say they were mislaid.

She closed the door but did not lock it, since Myambagh people feared not looters, only the flood. In the quiet, drenched streets she was delighted by the weight of the plastic-handled load, by the way Jelly’s scheme had claimed her. Her gnarled shoulders ached and itched, as often when she carried weight. This message of pain from the old world could be examined for a while and connected by a thin filament to the new.

Burnside was waiting for her in the dining room at the Railway. He looked well settled in, as if he’d had a pleasant breakfast with the other guests and had diverted them with tales of the construction industry. Shirley had just finished cleaning up and wiping down the filigreed plastic tablecloths. The place was still. Even today all the Monks and Escapees were scattered around households and public buildings in Myambagh, repairing for time-and-a-half the water damage of the past flood even while this one brewed and threatened.

Burnside rose, leaving behind his coffee, and stepped toward her.

—Been on a picnic? he asked, but did not wait for an answer. I could get stuck here now if you don’t …

—I’ll get your papers. Wait there.

First she carried Jelly’s Esky up the stairs and onto the upstairs verandah. Jack boasted that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century graziers, cowcockies, drovers, sawyers and bullockies used to play cricket up here. The fieldsmen in slips and covers had to catch the ball clean to prevent it soaring over the balcony, into the street or onto the railway lines. A young Aboriginal was always employed therefore to stand in the street below and retrieve hoiked balls. Thus on the Railway Hotel verandah, and on other
hotel verandahs in the antipodes, a three-dimensional game of cricket had been devised, height coming into the equation as well as length. A sub-fieldsman scouted the road and the steel lines, looking for the ball in thickets of paspalum grass by the goods yard, while upstairs the batsmen ran run after run and the fieldsmen leaned over the balcony screaming, Get it, you black bastard!

On this broad roof, the rain sounded like riveting guns. Kate found that someone had been into the annex—perhaps Shirley, who in between her high-cholesterol mode of cooking cleaned and set up rooms as well. Mattresses had been laid on the boards. Blankets and sheets were folded onto each mattress. On the orders of Jack and dark-eyed Connie, an emergency dormitory had been made. Kate wondered if Jelly knew matters at the Railway had reached such a degree of preparation?

A cupboard stood at the far end, suitable for the explosives. But Jelly had contemplated a vacant verandah. Nonetheless, for the moment, she decided to be obedient. He had said it was not volatile and it was his place to know. He must know of all these blankets and sheets, of the coming population of Murchison’s Railway Hotel’s normally unpeopled verandah.

Now she went to her room and closed the door. The air was cold and a dim blue, but she lay uncovered on the bed for a time and revived the flavor of her habitual Chifley dreams. No fur in the dream, though. No feather. Just motion above Australia’s absolute surfaces.

Guthega had argued one night that the way a kangaroo’s lungs hung down behind its ribs and the flab of the belly meant that the very motion of bounding sucked air in. Making light of the earth, or as Guthega had it, traveling like shit, itself caused the lungs to fill. There was never a gasp. All kangaroos, said Guthega, were marathoners.

Her throat closing up with desire, Kate imagined that state: the more you flew, the more you breathed. Flight made of you one continuous body of air.