A Woman of the Inner Sea (27 page)

Gus rolled down the back door on them, and then as of right, went around to the cabin and took the wheel. Kate in the passenger
seat, they drove west. They had a sense of the wide swamps and seas of the western sheep pastures. Semi-arid farming they called it. But not tonight. Rice paddies tonight. Fens.

Gus turned on the radio, and the newsreader began to read statistics about the flood. The unfortunate town of Myambagh. Twice stricken in the one year. Two hundred-year floods in twelve months.

Gus said, The centuries pass bloody quick in Myambagh.

—On a lighter note, said the newsreader. On a lighter note, a kangaroo and an emu up to now employed by the owner of a Dubbo entertainment park to provide the living elements in the tableau of the Australian coat of arms have been stolen. Chifley is a mature, male big gray kangaroo, eight years of age. Menzies is a male emu, nine years old … A police inspector from Dubbo was recorded as saying that this was not being treated as a light matter.

But that did not take the levity out of the news item. For Gus had heard the announcer say,
On a lighter note
 …

—People bloody amaze me. Out of the back of the Railway Hotel, Jack has every dog in Myambagh that hasn’t drowned, and that’s big news, part of the bloody headlines. An act of humanity. That’s not on a lighter note. But a kangaroo and an emu? That’s comedy in some people’s book.

With the aftertaste of the floodwater still in her mouth, Kate considered the issue of what was to be done with this truck in the end? As far as Girilambone, it was licit: a truck Gus had rescued from the flood. After Girilambone, it could be considered stolen. It had the owner’s name—O’Riordan—on the side. The name was a personal plea: don’t take away my instruments of trade just when I’m hardest hit; just when flood, and the decline of towns along all Australia’s aged waterways are narrowing down all business. She could still guess at the desperate feelings of Mr. O’Riordan, prickling with insomniac fear, watching the bush’s one late-night television channel.

It was apparent that Gus too thought of O’Riordan, both nobly and practically. About O’Riordan’s convenience but also about his red and blue name on the sides of the thing. A dead giveaway.

She watched Gus slide his jaw sideways away from his upper mouth, making a crooked gate of teeth.

A tall hayshed presented itself, open to the road, piled high with what even in half-light could be seen as strata of old, brown fermenting hay with blond bales, recently cut, on top. Around such a shed Chifley and Menzies, even if seen from the road, would look
au naturel
. Even if one was spotted by a passer-by, they would not present themselves to the eye as kidnapped performers.

Kate and Gus abandoned O’Riordan’s van and crossed the wet paddocks to climb in amongst the bales in the hayshed and mount from level to level of stacked hay. As they rose, Menzies stood by the glossy trunk of a she-oak and seemed utterly detached. He might be able to fend for himself in what was sentimentally called
the wild
. Chifley kept a distance, off amongst the tea trees, but Kate felt the shock again, the phantom of pleasure who always stood there by Chifley’s shoulder.

Gus said, Just watch out for tiger snakes.

Everyone knew tiger snakes spent slothful winters in places like this.

Gus erects a little cold- and windbreak of hay bales. It is a blind, a vantage point. Behind it he and Kate can sleep amidst the blue, pungent miasma rising from the bales. Moisture, heat, the furious bacteriology of cut hay.

Gus has brought the signpainter’s dropcloth with him too, and now spreads it across the surface of the bales.

—Best I can do. Sorry to say, it’s pretty spiky. Not the Hilton bloody Hotel. Sorry to say.

About to sleep, Gus remembers Jelly every few seconds.

—What about poor Jelly, eh?

There seems to Kate to be a large black-blue space in the corner of the shed which is Jelly’s absence. She feels the substance of his loss, the changed world, rather than any active frenzy. It is the weight that is awful. Again she looks to the idea that Chifley might lift it.

Kate and Gus, utterly dusted, have crept into each other’s arms, Kate in the chaste widowhood of the detonation she can still feel like a block of wood in her stomach and in either eardrum. Gus is reliably a gentleman, following the virtues which he picked up together with his farm mechanics from his battler father. Out in the seeping coldness, Menzies is asleep on his locked knee joints. Amongst the tea trees, Chifley sprawls for a moment, his enormous
legs spread. Kate is always aesthetically offended by an image of Chifley in repose. Never did he look so much like a beast of hindleg-heavy imbalance as he does now. She wants him to give her the consolation and easy air of bounding, the air which over-brims with every bound instead of, as in the human model, being emptied out. There is no air for her in the image of his repose.

North of the Darling, on the Schulberger farm, now owned and tended by Gus and his sister-in-law, stands a 1920s derelict building. It dates from a time of hearty intentions. Australia contributed to a fantastically remote war in Europe a larger number of its youth than did most of the
real
combatants, two out of three of these boys from the bush being casualties. Trying to say: here we are, here we are! Europe in the South Seas! Redeemed convicts! True Britons all, even the Irish!

The nation rewarded its returning heroes by giving them slabs of desert and the proud name Soldier Settler. Most of them farmed bravely on, sticking in the agrarian trenchline until the crash of 1929, or in some cases until the great drought at the start of another World War in the 1940s.

Gus’s and his late brother’s place has one remaining Soldier Settler homestead standing on it, and is in fact made up of two abandoned Soldier Settler farms of about two and a half thousand acres each. The abandoned house, far from the homesteads of Gus and his brother, has timber floors with ancient linoleum still stuck on them, and beneath the linoleum the newspapers of a hopeful year. The family who gave up the homestead in the end has left behind very few exhibits or artifacts, but the most notable is a white and black banded snake preserved in kerosene in a large jam jar.

Occasional iron bedsteads still stand as well—they belonged to children who perished of diphtheria or pneumonia or polio, and whom the parents were too weary to replace. Such are the beds to which Gus and Kate travel.

In Australia movement is not westward to the center but eastward to the coast. Australia is periphery. It dreams of and yet abandons the core. So that the furniture removal trucks, when met, and even discounting the flood, are moving all the time in the wrong direction for Gus and Kate and the beasts.

The sleeping Kate has with better success than she imagines
become the woman she wanted to become. Her hands are begrimed still and cut about from shoveling and bagging sand. Her hair is lank and damp, and the roots would not tolerate too exact an inquiry. She smells of sweat and unchanged underwear and mold. If the Prime Minister saw her, he would not know her now. He would not be able to say, Gidday Kate, still voting for me?

While cutting up vegetables in Connie Murchison’s kitchen, Kate, coming across references to Kozinski Constructions and small pictures of Paul or his father, would quickly enough start to fold the paper on itself over the scraped skins of carrots or the tops of onions or turnips.

But one brisk morning, she did see something she wanted to read and it was not to do with the not-so-Reverend Frank. She moved an eggshell to see the item better. It had to do with a man already mentioned in this account: Frank Pellegrino, film-maker and early lover of Kate.

Pellegrino was an anomaly, an Adelaide Sicilian. In some senses there was no more un-Sicilian a city than Adelaide. It started not as a convict settlement but as a yeoman-based experiment in progress. It had always lifted its skirts clear of the mad Irish-cum-Cockney convictry of Sydney. It prided itself on its British probity rather than on its Sicilians, except that Pellegrino couldn’t be ignored. He was one of the young directors who had emerged in Kate’s early adolescence and who sometimes expressed gratitude to Jim Gaffney for giving them a run in his cinemas against the advice of his board, and whose talent made a claim on everyone.

There was a pre-existent bond—to do with Jim Gaffney’s reputation—between Kate and Pellegrino.

Pellegrino’s youth had been spent making television commercials but dreaming, of course, of the feature film. He unleashed his cameraman, a Croatian from Melbourne named Rapotec, on the sublime desolations of Central Australia, and he confessed always to wishing that what they saw through the viewfinder of the Croatian’s camera could be employed to narrate tales rather than to sell petroleum products. He had made his first feature film for less than half a million dollars in one of the old Cornish copper mining towns in the South Australian wilderness. His film was chosen by the international jury for showing at the Cannes Film Festival. No sooner was it seen and misunderstood by Hollywood than he was
desperately yearned for, and within a few years he was living in Beverly Hills and making studio films, two of which won Academy Awards for various of his technicians and actors, and one of which earned him an Oscar for himself.

Kate met him when the winning film reached Australia. She took him over in fact at the airport, as was her job, led him through a press conference, got him into his hotel, supervised his itinerary and accompanied him to every large city in the Commonwealth for premieres of his film. A number of women in Bernard Astor’s office and in the film distribution business in general warned her at cocktail parties to be careful of him. He had a pleasant, larrikin style. In it he liked to conduct the whole palaver of seduction.

She found him however to be a defenseless, short man, negligently dressed. He was exhausted by the flight from California. He confided in her in an urgent whisper how he had been kept awake by the terror of coming home.

—This is a bloody tough country to come back to, he would say again and again.

She told him that all the nation was proud of him and felt included in his success.

He said, That’s the ordinary people, love. What about the culture police? They’re going to ask me why I went to America, why I made American movies, when I’m going to come home. As if Australian bloody films had been available for me to make, once
they’d
worked the industry over. I know I’m going to get the big question, and there’s no answering it.

All the critics who met him at press conferences were genial however, and didn’t ask the questions he feared.

—Jesus, love, he confided in her. I think this bloody country might be changing for the better.

His tentative exhilaration began to color all the meals they had together, all the jokes they shared in the lifts and corridors of all the good hotels. She began to indulge that perilous feeling that she’d known him since childhood.

But he was still tremulous about the premiere in his own home city.

—Not a big Dago city, love. Not even a big Irish one either. The only bloody state of Australia where the Anglos still hold the redoubts.

But the Adelaide acclaim was so full-throated that she could see the final ropes of tension dissolve in his face. His parents attended a great post-screening melee in a vast marquee by the banks of the Torrens. She’d been expecting to see workworn Sicilian market gardeners, but they were in fact two stylish retired restaurant managers. Their quiet, well-ordered elation reduced him safely in her eyes to the status of son rather than director. She forgave him the slight vanity by which he’d represented the parents to her as hapless and bewildered peasants.

Back in the hotel, in the corridor, he took her easily into his arms. She could smell on his breath the sourness, the enormous amount he had drunk to protect himself from failure.

—Marry me, he said with vinous ardor.

He meant it of course, and she knew he would continue to for the rest of the tour. He was the sort of man who said these extreme things easily, and then went to a lot of trouble to believe them for a day or two. He remained a devoted lover from Adelaide to Perth and then back to Sydney. Sitting in planes he would touch her helplessly and gaze at her and praise her. It was all of such a high octane that there was a kind of relief when at last, with a keen but feigned wistfulness, he got on the plane to go back to Beverly Hills. He had to face up there to the berserk expectations he had raised by winning an Academy Award.

An altered Kate moved an eggshell to read in the kitchen of Murchison’s Railway Hotel a feature on her old three-city lover, Pellegrino. His picture on the page on which she was about to roll things brought back a reminiscent dry flutter behind her ribs, a serpent turning over in husks of corn. The feature said his last film,
The Reaper
, story of a
crime passionnel
on a Texas farm, had done poorly. It had received no nominations at all, and had lost money and been badly reviewed.