Shearers' Motel (10 page)

Wet noses smeared the sliding glass doors.

‘They know we're talking about them.'

‘You think so?'

‘They always seem to.'

Dogs' faces reflected his wife's and daughters' every mood, while he saw only impassive disinterest in their eyes, believing they lived out their dogs' lives for dogs' reasons, and were certainly only hungry. He forgot the emotions he had seen in his fox terrier pup forty years ago, anticipating the range of life's possibilities.

 

A week passed and a stranger rang. He'd heard he could cook. He wasn't a contractor or an overseer but a grazier from the stony slopes of the Dividing Range where fine wool sheep were run. Their wool, worth more by weight than gold, was auctioned in separate bales to Italian fine-wool suitmakers and Japanese woollen mills. The idea was that he would live in the farmer's house, cook in the farm kitchen, and the shearers would come over and eat their meals there.

There was a kind of life he was after in the sheds, and this wasn't it.

He was hoping for a soft Kiwi accent whenever he picked up the phone. ‘Thet you, Cookie?' It didn't come. He wasn't just a cook, he realised. He was part of a story that would only get told through living. It might have started anywhere, but chance had started it somewhere, with a phone call to a hot inland town, and it was from there that he would pursue it. He didn't want to mope around in a craggy-faced, penny-pinching grazier's house while the grazier's wife was in hospital. (Which was why he was being asked.) He used the excuse of family commitments, and declined the job.

‘So you'll be here for Irene's birthday?' Marie and Ella questioned him fiercely.

‘Of course. Didn't I say so before?'

‘No. You
didn't
say. Not to us.'

‘All right. It's a promise.'

Another week passed and Alastair rang. He had a major shed going. It was a beauty. It was a Wool Corporation training school, three weeks, an excellent kitchen, hard working, sincere young crowd of Aussie learners, men and girls, no playing up, no wild cards in the pack, early nights, regular as clockwork — and very small numbers at the weekends. Possibly even nobody. He had been given a high rating by Alastair's Kiwis and if he could start in three days' time then Alastair would be very chuffed.

He told Alastair he was sorry. He would like to go up to Warren and do that job. But he couldn't get away. And
Alastair was off the phone, leaving it dead in his hand practically before he finished speaking.

‘I wanted to say yes,' he told Sharon. ‘I feel as if everything I want to do is slipping away, that I'm losing my chance at this, forgetting what it is that drives me.'

 

Another phone call came. It was from a woman in town to tell him she had a five year old Jack Russell terrier called Sadie — that Sharon had been asking around everywhere for a dog for him — and this Sadie was the perfect companion for long trips: loyal, tireless, an animal that would eat anything, crunch chicken bones, devour chop bones, and was house trained. He could have her on trial, and if he liked her, he could have her for nothing.

He looked at Sharon and understood something: that she was better at seeing people independent from herself than he was.

‘You can go away any time, whenever you like,' he imagined her thinking. ‘It's not a matter of our giving permission or anything like that, it's your life and I'd feel terrible if I was responsible for fencing you in, or whatever it is you feel at this time. We're your family, not your keepers. The only thing to remember is our feelings. That's all. I know that's the hardest thing for a man, you think there's a contradiction in what I'm saying, and you think that the two things don't fit together. But they do. They can. You just have to use your imagination to feel it, that's all. So here is an expression of love for you, a small dog, please look after her, don't do anything careless that would put her at risk, and as for yourself personally, stay happy, because if you don't, what's the point of anything?'

 

The phone seemed to have been ringing for hours through a long, difficult dream. There were torn party hats and stale slices of fairy bread, crumpled present wrappings and cold, fatty clusters of leftover saveloys in a saucepan on the stove when he groped through the house late at night to answer it. His tongue was thick from postparty recovery whiskies.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello there. I suppose you cannot guess who this is.'

The voice at the other end of the line had flattened, measured New Zealand vowels. It came from a silence that made the man picture a bare room, a slice of starlight across shiny linoleum, large bare feet on a cool floor.

‘Bertram Junior?' The voice had an oceanic calmness about it, but no charismatic crosscurrents.

‘Heh, heh. No-oo. This is that man's brother. Harold. I am the one who ordered your stores for Leopardwood Downs. I run the teams for Alastair. I have heard all about your cooking. Nothing untoward, I must say. You come with a high recommendation. My brother Bertram Junior and my best mate-shearer Lenny told me of the good job you done. The question I am ringing to ask you is, are you available for work? The location is Gograndli Station, on the Lachlan River, north of Hay. I have been left in the lurch by my regular cook, and I'm mad as a hornet with her. I don't ever want to see her again. But that is by the by. We start three days from now. Does that give you time to get mobile?'

‘It does — just. I'm interested — yes.'

He was obviously to be the fill-in.

‘Excellent. Now we can see how we get along. Who knows. You might consider coming with us permanent. That's how serious I am about changing cooks. And how mad I am at that person who was my cook before, Cookie.' The voice seemed to expand, come close, and to hover over future work-prospects like a puffy fair-weather cloud, promising calm and pleasant days ahead, mutual understanding, serene relations. ‘The facilities at the shed we just finished were nothing short of luxurious but that cook of mine she chose to make endless complaints, and wouldn't touch the dishwasher that was at her disposal, not to mention the run-in she had with the resident cook, a fine sort of woman. But there you go. There is no pleasing some people. After Gograndli, Cookie, we are booked to do some real travelling — all over the country. My brother says that is the style of work you are after, which is why I thought of you right now, even this late at night.'

The day he went to fetch his dog from the farm where she lived she was digging holes around a chook-yard, head down and rump in the air, dirt flying back. ‘This is the problem,' said the woman who owned her. ‘As long as there aren't any chooks to bother she's fine. But last week she killed my best layer and before that it was the bantams, and now there's no holding her back. The pity is we love her.'

Sadie was a chunky, brick-shaped terrier, white with black patches and gingery splotches. Her teeth were sharp and her jaws powerful. He reached down and twitched her high, alert ears. She scrabbled her short legs to get up to him and nuzzled his face. Her breath smelt ancient. He lifted her into his arms, where she settled in comfortably, the black rubbery corners of her mouth trickling a muddy mixture of dirt and saliva.

A bloodshot eye rolled and engaged his. Man and dog seemed to know each other from a process of soul-searching that coincided just here. He hadn't felt this way since he was nine.

The woman took him over to the shearing shed to demonstrate Sadie's ability as a ratter. They watched
from the gloom behind the wool bins. Sadie dealt with rodents with the nonchalance of an axeman-executioner, imperiously devoted, placing a paw on the neck of one victim while crunching another; tossing that one away while clamping the next as it scurried past, and making no sound except for a wheezy, urgent breath against the impersonal snapping of bones.

 

Man and dog crossed a saltbush plain as wide as the sea. The sun rose, blazing out over the flatness of the Riverina. Far ahead, sunlight clipped a line of trees showing where the river was. A plume of blue smoke rose above the trees; homestead roofs glinted; windmills shone; and he glanced at the map on his knee. A long way to go yet to Gograndli Station.

The river came close. Edged closer. The truck entered a narrow forest fringing the banks, flickering past red gums and wattles. He sighted a roadside breakfast fire, the source of the smoke, and a cameo of still, standing men and women and parked vehicles — roo shooters' Landcruisers and chiller trucks, with rifle racks visible at back windows and green canvas swags on the ground. The riverside looked the place to be, parklike and dappled. He hoped Gograndli shed would have a setting like it.

The river itself was a chain of scoured, milky ponds, where the flood of the month before was marked by serried waterlines on clay banks. It was overhung by red gums, jammed with fallen logs.

The truck crossed over a cement bridge, and then snapped out the other side into clear light again, and they were back on the saltbush plain riding an elevated roadbed, traversing in a few minutes a stretch of swampy ground that bullock teams in the last century would have taken all day to cross.

Sadie slipped down from her window and plopped onto the car seat next to him, looking up at him expectantly. She farted silently, with rich, foul fullness. ‘Did you do that? Did you fart, you little bastard? Bugger me you
did, and don't lie, it was you and you can't pretend it wasn't. Just don't fart again or it's curtains, the long hike, hooroo and goodbye. Understand?'

He could not believe this. It was his own voice talking. Communing with a dog.

It was easy to get into the habit. ‘Just
listen
to me.' There wasn't any mystery to it. ‘What are we going to find this time?' — the dog absorbing part of himself he couldn't handle at any moment, blotting away boredom and irritation, nervous anticipation, second thoughts about where he was going, what he was letting himself in for again, convincing him there was more to himself than he guessed, that he was a whole world in himself, he would get along, because look at him, he was into the work again, and the life meant something, didn't it?

He had only to reach out and rest the palm of his hand on her small, chubby neck, and the restless anxiety that was his main mode of thinking would quieten.

 

Way out on the saltbush plain they took a dirt road turn-off and followed the river. The approach to Gograndli was mysterious, smoke-wreathed, enticing. It was his image of re-entering the life. But seen closer, many trees had been cut down over the years, leaving grey stumpy clearings. Peelings of bark lay on overgrazed ground. Shade was meagre in the morning heat. Sheep lifting their gazes as the truck went past were like skeletons in overcoats.

Gograndli homestead was wide and low, surrounded by lawns and shade trees. It was an early pisé or mudbrick construction on a shady rise above the river. Whoever came here last century had meant to stay. It had an extensive galvanised iron roof, shuttered rooms opening out onto a flagstoned terrace, red-gum verandah poles, a mustard-coloured wash on the walls, and dark, green-painted eaves, guttering and downpipes. There were rifle slits in an outhouse. Maybe originally it had been a wayside inn. Now it was a place photographed for style magazines. Inside would be French-polished furniture.
Fine books. (Maybe even one he'd written himself.) There would be the whiff of air molecules in there absolutely stationary from year to year. An area of startling green lawn hung over a bend in the river, where there was a reedy waterhole. Ducks, black swans, ibis, and pelicans swam there. Crows milled overhead. Projecting down into the waterhole was the inlet pipe of a diesel pump, which thundered as he went past, sending out black smoke through a thin, rusted chimneypipe, supplying a lawnspray that sent out silver kicks of water in a wide, sumptuous arc, splashing the dusty windscreen of the truck.

He saw a man dragging a length of polypipe across the grass, putting his back into it. A man wearing a straw hat with a crisp white hatband, his shoulders strained to the task. He supposed this was Winston Didale, who had answered the phone at Gograndli the night before last when he called ahead to find out if there would be station meat ready for the shearers' first meal.

‘No, can't help, sorry,' had been the response.

This was a surprise. Stations normally supplied meat. He had learned that. The only question was keeping them up to the mark.

‘What about a packet of chops and a leg from the homestead?' he suggested. ‘Just put them in the fridge in the quarters. Something to keep us going till we get sorted out.'

‘To tell you the truth,' said the station owner, ‘I stopped killing about a year ago when my arthritis crippled me. I've lost all the strength in my hands.'

‘Sorry to hear about that. There's not much I can do about it,' and he rang Harold in the inland town for guidance.

Harold cleared his throat, following it with an expressive silence. He didn't know anything about any arthritis. ‘That fellow is a good client,' he added eventually, suggesting that he bring mince and sausages in his Esky, to be reimbursed from the mess account, and leave Harold to do something about the first lot of mutton, after which he
would kill station sheep himself. ‘I have a mate in town who is a butcher. I'll get a carcase from him and bring it out to the station for you.'

‘Wouldn't it be better to tell the owner to pull his finger out? Doesn't he have a stationhand who could do the job? Isn't he obliged to co-operate?'

‘Let's not get too worked up about this,' said Harold.

 

The supply lane past Gograndli homestead took a right-angle turn to the other side of the river, and crossed a log bridge snagged with debris. The truck nosed through a broken-hipped gate, pulling up beside a mudbrick outhouse, a ruin. He surveyed his new workplace with a heavy heart. The laundry wall was rubble. The wash-tubs were open to the sky under a sagging cantilever of rusted corrugated iron. Pink-primed doors of the shearers' huts faced each other across a narrow laneway. It was the ideal location for a chain gang movie. Between the huts was a view straight out onto the plain, into the heat and mirage of the west. It was as if there was no river, no shade, no comfort anywhere, and the pretensions of Gograndli homestead on the opposite bank were only a taunt, reminding those who lived passing lives that makeshift was all they had.

There was an old chook-run at the back of the huts with drifts of poultry feathers piled against the wire. Sadie needed no invitation to get started. He tried to hook his finger through her thin, silver-star-studded collar to restrain her, but too late. The smell of poultry and the possibility of a rats' nest blitzkrieg was enough. Out the window Sadie went, sailing to the ground like a dollop of porridge, then rocketing from sight.

 

The shearers made their way to Gograndli in ones and twos of dilapidated vehicles that once had been the pride of town lairs. Sadie ran out to meet them.

‘Whosiz dis little fucker?'

‘Cookie's.'

‘Whatser name?'

‘Sadie.'

‘C'm ere, Sadie.'

A man named Cal scooped the dog up in the fingers of one hand, held her to his face, growling and laughing, the flat face of a Maori carving meeting the sharp lizardy features of an Australian reptile-killer, leaving Sadie's short buckled legs dangling, making her yap, holding her to the sky and examining her like a butcher assessing a porker — Sadie with teats like a sow; with black, white, and ginger spots; with a greedy, dribbling, dirty slit of mouth — and then rolling her onto the ground with a deep chuckle.

‘Fuck off then, ya squirt.'

Sadie retreated under the huts, barking with razorlike persistence.

‘Dem teeth could snap a bone,' nodded Cal admiringly. ‘I love dem terriers.' He got down on his hands and knees and stared under the huts in a transfixed, unfocused fashion, not actually looking at the dog, more as if he had forgotten the dog, as if the dog had created in his mind a more interesting idea to follow — a fascinating shadow, enticing Cal's brain away under the huts.

When Sadie's yaps faded Cal shook his head and came back to the present.

‘Some goer, Cookie, ay,' and shambled off to his room.

 

Harold wore an All Blacks rugby jumper despite the heat, a pair of charcoal football shorts, and wide rubber thongs. His black curly hair fell over his forehead, and he had an expression of wary friendliness. He was in his mid-thirties, with a controlled, man-of-consequence aura that made him seem older.

‘So you have a dog,' Harold stroked his chin, then hooked one foot back on the bullbars, dangling a thong, and looked at his new cook from a slight sideways angle, just as Bertram Junior had done. Except Harold didn't seem ready to follow a situation any old way, to see where the fizz led, like his brother. He wasn't someone to wait and see what developed. He had the look of a fireman who smothered smoke all the time.

They walked down the laneway between the huts while he whistled up Sadie.

‘Here she is,' he said, introducing her to Harold. ‘Is she a problem?'

‘No. Of course not. Not necessarily. I am a dog lover myself from way back. Lots of cooks have dogs because of the loneliness of the kitchen. Hello, Sadie,' he boomed, legs planted apart like a colossus. ‘You're a real little salami, heh, heh.' His eyes switched round in the direction of the man again. ‘It's just that we have to be careful of the grower here. I am here to tell you, the gent we are dealing with has a problem.'

‘Over killers?'

‘That's just one matter,' Harold nodded his head judiciously. ‘There is another point to consider. Winston Didale was very dissatisfied with the behaviour of some of the people at crutching time. You see, some of the fellows got cut one night in town, and they come back here and played up something terrible. An incident occurred concerning a dog. A couple of very low characters strung a dog up in a bush and beat it with a stick. I will not have them in the team any more. It's the bane of my life, Cookie, that I can't be in two places at once. There was a fellow on the team who didn't like animals being treated this way. He come back from town later, and walked in from the gate so no one could hear. Then he came in and he caught the dog-beaters while they were asleep. As a matter of fact it was his dog they crucified. He used a piece of construction timber. Can you imagine it. He put two men in hospital. Those two men are still looking for the man concerned to get their own back. The grower could hear the ruckus from the big house and it created a negative impression.'

 

Sadie hunted in the rubbish tip in a slit of earth behind the kitchen. It was choked from years of dumping, filled with metallic solid waste: a buckled square iron water tank, rolls of rusted barbed wire, sheets of tin, smashed beer bottles. It was a hiding place for lizards and snakes. Sadie
disappeared in there for hours, wriggling through dangerous crevices that could slice her in half or pierce her to the heart with rusty spikes. He forgot about her, deliberately didn't think of her, it was her life and this was his — sinking down into the routine of the work, getting the stores organised, greeting the new arrivals as they drove in at all hours. Then she would be there at the back steps, nose against the gauze of the kitchen door, her plump hindquarters wagging in compensation for the tail that had been docked (and now was just a curl of bristly hairs).
Any news for me? Any developments?

 

Close to midnight Lenny and Flash arrived, headlights sweeping the compound, car stereo blaring, doors slamming, footsteps on dusty boards, the pair of them coming in to greet him, saying they were glad to have this shed because of his cooking, pumping his hand and accepting a toasted sandwich at this hour, and glancing over their shoulders as two other figures came in after them, dark-haired and luminous-eyed. Rosie and Louella. ‘Ay, Cookie, great to see ya. What's there to eat? Got en apple?'

All the way to Gograndli the man had hoped for familiar faces. Now he had them. In the chill night air Louella had commandeered Harold's pure wool sweater, and leaned against the door jamb like a model. She looked beautiful and lost. She would never know quite what was going on around her, in herself, between others. The men and Rosie stood around telling him where they had been, what they had done since he left them at the Golden Horseshoe Motel. This was what he had come back to find, a sense of belonging that was like getting up pace and swinging aboard a ramshackle carousel. Through the weeks of waiting for work he'd imagined confidences, developing understandings, a sense of lives — his and theirs — interconnecting, becoming like one.