Landscape of Farewell (11 page)

I was very glad to have him back. With his return the balance of the place, and of my own sanity, seemed at once to be more
certain. After a sleepless night in the company of old ghosts from my childhood I was not certain I would remain sane for long if I were to live here alone as he did.

I was walking down the path towards the house from the hen run, carrying the bucket with the eggs in it, when he came out the back door and signalled to me with his mobile telephone. He had taken off his hat and coat and was wearing his familiar faded red-checked shirt and jeans, the sleeves of his shirt buttoned at the wrists as usual. When I drew level with him I said with feeling, ‘Welcome home, Dougald. It is really very good to see you.’ I would have embraced him, but was too shy to do so. He gave me a slow smile, as if he enjoyed a secret pleasure, knowing in my eyes the ghosts who had haunted my solitary hours during his absence. He handed me the telephone. ‘Vita wants to say g’day, old mate.’ He turned and went back inside the kitchen and I stood out on the concrete under the tree. She said she was flying north the next day and would spend a week with us before taking me back to Sydney with her. She was not hiring a car this time but expected Dougald and I to meet her at the airport in Mackay. ‘Before you go home to Hamburg you can stay here at my place for a few days and I’ll show you Sydney properly.’ I said it would be wonderful to see her again. My pleasure at the thought of seeing her was genuine, but I also felt a sharp regret that my time alone with Dougald was to come to an end so abruptly. She was so enthusiastic about her visit that I did not feel I could ask her
to postpone it, however, and said nothing about my ambivalence. ‘I can’t wait to get away from this madhouse,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be wicked up there with you guys. Hey listen, we’ll go for a picnic to the river. The three of us and the dogs.’ It was an idyllic scene she described to me then, our warm, lazy afternoons drifting into evening as we cooked fresh-caught fish over the coals of our fire, and later walked in the moonlit bush together, arm in arm, engaged in animated conversation, as she and I had done as we walked together down Heilwigstrasse that first day of our meeting in Hamburg. There was in her enthusiasm, it seemed to me, an unrealistic expectation of a renewal of that first delight at our surprising friendship. I knew such things could not be repeated and feared her expectation would result in disappointment. Before she hung up she said, ‘Make sure Dougald’s not late getting in to Mackay. I hate not being met at airports.’

I stood outside the kitchen in the shade of the old tree and looked around me with a feeling of intense regret that I was to take my leave of this place and of Dougald so soon. I felt very strongly in that moment that I had failed to understand what it was I was doing there. I felt I had missed it. That it had evaded me. That I had proved inadequate to it. My silly notion of being on leave from the questions of my life. I felt, as I stood, my dogs pressing their flanks against my legs, that I had been a disappointment. I looked off towards the scrub and I leaned and rubbed the soft ears of the dogs between my fingers. There was,
in my friendship with Dougald, surely no sense of an ending but rather of an aborted beginning of something that had not had the opportunity to mature. Vita was certain to take charge the moment she arrived. Her large, energetic presence would bring to an end the peculiar silence of this place. The silence between Dougald and I.
His
silence. A silence that was, in a mysterious way, the medium through which he and I had only just begun to understand each other. ‘It’s time to go,’ I said to the dogs, and picked up the bucket and went into the kitchen.

Dougald was sitting at the table working on his laptop, as if he had not been away, his black briefcase open beside him. He looked up at me as I came in through the door and waited for me to speak. I wanted to tell him that I had no desire to leave just yet. I wanted to thank him while he and I were still on our own. Indeed there was a confusion of emotions in me that I could not hope to express and I could not think how I might speak of my gratitude to him or my fondness for him in a way that would not embarrass us both. I held the bucket for him to see. ‘Seven eggs,’ I said. Always seven.

It was not the light of a passing meteor, nor a dream of youth, nor even the crowing of the rooster, but the barking of the dogs that I woke to. Why is it, I wonder, that I am forever recording my moments of awakening? I assumed Dougald had another early visitor, and I turned over and covered my head with the blanket. The barking persisted, becoming more frenzied by the minute, and I was soon convinced that something must be amiss. I got out of bed and pulled on my dressing-gown and went out to the back door. My two brown dogs pranced excitedly around me, barking and darting out into the yard and back to me again. It was just breaking day, a tight band of cold light splitting the sky in a great arc to the east. I could see no cause for the excitement of the dogs and asked them peevishly why they had woken me
so early and had not waited for the rooster to perform his regular office of the day. I was about to return to the warmth of my bed when Dougald and his wolf-like bitch joined us. My dogs became at once subdued and hung close to me.

Dougald was wearing an old denim jacket over his jeans. He glanced at me as if he was surprised to see me there. Murmuring a greeting, he turned and stood looking towards the back of the yard. He was unsmiling, his manner close. I followed the direction of his gaze, and immediately realised the goat was no longer there. I experienced an unpleasant start of guilt at this, recollecting suddenly that I had not finished hammering in her peg the previous day after being distracted by Dougald’s arrival in the blue car. Dougald set off, suddenly and without a word, walking with an unusually brisk stride, along the path towards the back of the yard, his bitch close at his side. I and my dogs followed. He went on past the hen run until he reached the back fence, where he stood holding the slack barbed wire and waiting for me to climb through. I thanked him and ducked through the wire. I held it for him in turn and he stepped through after me. I waited for the dogs to jump through, which they did in such an orderly manner it might have been rehearsed—were we a band of circus performers practising our art at the edge of the town in the magic light of dawn? As we set off across the paddock the hulks of the abandoned bulldozers loomed in the silvery dawn light ahead of us—surely they were not innocent pachyderms
after all, but were the abandoned conveyances of a doomed race whose members had all passed away long ago. I was impressed by Dougald’s gloomy manner and was anxiously hoping that everything was going to be all right. I knew, however, with that
knowing
we experience at such times, that everything was not going to be all right. Is it not a residue of our childhood dread, this, persisting in us, a superstitious fear of the unknown of the adult world and of the punishment we know we deserve at the hands of our superiors?

Dougald pointed ahead. I looked to where he pointed and at once made out the goat’s broken trail through the tussock grass. There were dark patches where her dainty hoofs had wiped the dew, and scuffs where she had dragged her peg across the patches of bare ground. We followed her trail, two men and their dogs walking with purpose across the open paddock in the dawn towards the tall timber lining the riverbank. Surely I had witnessed such a scene somewhere in my past life? An onlooker then, seeing those men and their dogs in the cold light out on some dire business? The air was cold now and Dougald’s hands were thrust into the pockets of his old denim jacket, his collar turned up, the closeness of his manner discouraging.

The moment we reached the riverbank we saw her. The ground fell away abruptly at our feet for ten or twelve metres in a near-vertical cliff. It was a dangerous and precipitous place. The elaborate root structures of the great trees had been deeply
undermined by erosion, and the mesh of their intricate lattice exposed to the air. Except for a stagnant scum of green algae, which glowed in the cold morning light with a faint and eerie sheen, the riverbed was dry. The exposed tree roots formed the matrix of an elaborate trap. She was hanging by her tether rope, her wooden peg lodged in the fork of a root two or three metres below us. Her tongue lolled from the side of her mouth, purple and swollen, and might have been her disgorged stomach. She hung there, spinning slowly, grinning up at us, her teeth glinting in the rictus of death, her intelligent antique eyes no longer shining with her secret interior life, but bulging blindly, the pupils dull. She was a hideous sight. Her death must have been slow and terrible, for her hoofs had scored the bank deeply in her helpless struggle to free herself.

I looked at Dougald. He seemed not to be aware of me, and might have been alone there, gazing solemnly down the bank at the strangled goat. Even in that first moment of dismay, before I’d had time to reflect on my reaction to this terrible event, I thought it strange that Dougald did not appear to be surprised, but looked at the dead goat as if her death confirmed something for him—her carcass the fulfilment of a gloomy premonition that had been haunting him forever, a moment long expected, the end of something, not the beginning.

‘What can we do?’ I said, knowing there was nothing to be done but needing to break the terrible silence between us.
So still and inward was he, I might not have spoken. I shivered in the cold morning air and clutched my old grey dressing-gown close around me. I felt accused and shamed by his silence. It was the way I had felt with my uncle when he and I had visited together the scene of a clumsiness of mine that resulted in damage to his new binder. My uncle stood then silently, just as Dougald stood now, looking at his broken machine, his silence more humiliating than if he had shouted or struck me. I thought sadly what an unhappy pair of old men Vita would find when we fetched her back with us later in the day from the airport at Mackay. Her visit was certain now to be painful and difficult for all of us. How was I to reconcile this sinister riverbank, I wondered, with her romantic fantasy of picnics beside a flowing stream filled with fish? I doubted if she had ever visited this river but had surely only ever imagined it from the distance of Dougald’s house, as I had myself. For the first time since my arrival I felt an awkwardness with Dougald, and was no longer confident of his goodwill.

I turned to him and, with a formality that was entirely unworthy of our friendship and the trust he had shown in me, I said, ‘Please accept my apology, Dougald. I am truly sorry. This is my fault. I did not take sufficient care to hammer her peg in firmly when I shifted her tether yesterday.’ I do not know what I expected him to say to this, but as soon as I had spoken, I heard in the stiffness of my apology an echo of that other apology in
the foyer at Warburg Haus—the apology that had postponed my death and had been the beginning of all this.

Dougald turned to me. He looked at me steadily for a long moment, then he said, ‘This is not my country.’ It took me a moment to realise it was a confession, a revelation of a private truth, and that he required no answer from me. There was in his tone something of a decision, as if his mind had been made up after a period of great uncertainty.

I was incredulous. ‘How is this not your country?’ I said. What could he mean? It seemed as if he wished to absolve himself from any further connection to the gruesome sight below us, and even to dissociate himself from his entire situation in this place with this astonishing statement. With a small lift of his shoulders, which I took to be the gesture of a man who feels himself defeated—though whether by some internal incapacity of his own or by external circumstances and the inadequacies of others, I could not say—he said, ‘We’d better get going, or we’ll be late for Vita.’ He turned abruptly and set off across the paddock back towards the house.

I stood watching him go. The enormous silence of the landscape was suddenly close and oppressive, the unrelieved solitude of the forlorn township in the ocean of scrub, the abandoned machines rusting into the ground, the mean little fibro house; suddenly it was not a haven but a scene of desolation and failure, and Dougald a bewildered exile in it. I would have
given anything to have been able to go back and hammer in the goat’s peg firmly. It felt to me as if it had been only the surety of her tether that had kept our expectations alive. I turned again to the riverbank, as if I expected her to be gone and for this to be nothing more than a momentary confusion of the senses. She revolved slowly in the grey light, displayed in her death agony as if she were the victim of a barbaric fetish, a warning to travellers. I felt once again that old sense of moral failure and I thought of the gipsy girl and her fruitless appeal to me. I saw her this time, however, not in a real scene recollected from memory, but in an imaginary setting imbued with the nostalgia of my youthful longing to one day grow up to be a good man. She walked away from me across a field in the soft light of a summer evening, and I was young again and I followed her, for there was a modest invitation in the way she paused and turned to look back at me, smiling her knowing, solitary smile, gazing at me from a landscape of farewell.

We were sitting at the kitchen table eating our breakfast. I had developed a headache and had no appetite for the food. I pushed my plate away and sat back and looked out the door towards the tree. I remember the moment with such clarity I believe I could still count the bars of sunlight and shadow cast by the shed and the cottage across the trunk of that ancient eucalypt. As I sat looking out on the familiar scene, squinting against the light and the throbbing in my head, I asked myself,
Why this depth of desolation?
I was moved by love and sorrow for this place, and for the strange and sudden loss of it—my failure. My failure. That is how I saw it. How else was I to see it? What would Vita say? What would I say to her? I have rarely felt so useless to my fellow creatures. It should have been me
hanging by that rope, not the innocent nanny-goat.