Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (19 page)

‘Remember that morning I met you on the path and you had your skirt tucked up and your hands full of eggs and you said, “It's not the end of the world”?' he whispered. ‘Well, that's when I started realising how fantastic you are.'

She snuggled in close to him. ‘I remember,' she said. ‘Go on!' She listened to him. His voice went on, recounting every detail of their meetings and as she began to drift towards sleep an idea came to her. She drowsed and gave credit to the possibility that she might somehow be able to stay behind on the station with him while the rest of the family went for their annual holiday to the coast. It was too good an idea to resist; it pushed aside for a little while all the difficulties they would have to face.

As the sun streamed down across the golden paddocks, they slept in each other's arms.

six

According to a number of accounts the rain had been patchy, some places receiving as much as two inches while others had no more than a few points. Rankin was eager to be gone from Ida's cousin's place and on the strength of the reports about the storm had decided not to wait for the rendezvous with Crofts after all, but to go early and see if he could get through in the Ford without the help of the jeep.

He stopped the car and got out and walked to where the red gravel ended. To his right a few yards ahead the road forked. At the right fork stood a wooden sign which said AVONDALE in large block letters. There was no sign on the left fork, but this was the way he had to go. He walked to the very end of the gravel and stopped. He lit a cigarette and gazed at the grey road ahead of him. It presented not a single track through the grass but several sets of tracks—each was pretty much as good or as bad as the other, offering the same amount of risk.

There was no good reason why this section of road between the Avondale turn-off and the creek crossing should have remained unsealed all these years. The fault was really Rankin's. Had he been prepared to be a little more generous and encouraging in his relations with them, the Shire Council would have readily voted him substantial assistance for the forming and sealing of this section. People thought Rankin stubborn and difficult, and were fond of asserting that he had a blind spot when it came to dealing with people. Perhaps there was some truth in this. But there was something else as well, which was closer to the real reason why the road—like so many other things in the station owner's life—remained a problem when it could have been fixed with little effort. Rankin would have felt uneasy if he knew that the road into his place was open at all times. He preferred things the way they were—uncertain.

The existence of an all-weather road into the station would have made him feel vulnerable; though vulnerable to precisely what he would not have been able to say. Being on the edge of things had acquired for Rankin over the decades the comfortingly familiar feel that others have when they know themselves to be at the
centre
of events. Decisiveness afforded him little comfort and no pleasure, so he avoided it, and thus rendered his motives equivocal and unexaminable.

He stood deep in thought at the end of the sealed section of the road, considering his alternatives. Here and there along the tracks ahead of him were shallow pools of water reflecting the cool blue sky perfectly, as if they were holes in a paper-thin Earth. Janet had turned up the car radio and the regular thump of a bass rhythm was pounding out through the still morning—the sound reminded Rankin of the old single-cylinder diesel engines that had once been used to pump water.

He walked further along the road, heading out onto the black soil, scuffing it with his boots and considering his chances. Despite himself he tended to move in a kind of half-time with the beat of the music. The landscape, though its folds and hillocks concealed significant landmarks and large numbers of cattle, appeared almost perfectly flat and empty, totally without life. It presented to the eye a single treeless sweep of dry native grassland which finally abutted the remote ranges. There was not a cloud in the sky. Yet Rankin recognised this as just the type of weather of which his father would have remarked, ‘It
wants
to rain.' He felt it himself. The storm had brought a turnaround. The change was in the air. He knew that before ten o'clock there would be cloud banks forming over the hills. When he was some distance away from the car out on the black soil, he heard Janet's and Alistair's voices raised angrily. They were fighting again. The sound of the angry voices of his children confirmed his sense of the rightness of a number of decisions he had already made.

He stopped at the edge of the first shallow pool. It was no more than two metres across. It wasn't the water that would stop him. He could build up enough speed to ease off the pedal and coast through. It was the risk of losing his grip and breaking through the crust on the other side when he accelerated with clogged treads that was the real danger. He contemplated the track for a few seconds, not really making an assessment of its condition but staring at it blindly while the tension built up in him. Then he decided: if they got stuck they could sit and wait for Crofts to snig them out. He walked back to the car.

He reached across and switched off the radio.

‘We can't just have it down a bit, I suppose?' Janet asked mildly, not really expecting her father to be reasonable, but proposing reasonableness, more for her own record than anything. She was sitting next to him in the front passenger seat.

‘Leave it off!' he ordered defensively, putting his hand over the switch as if she were still a small child and might battle him for control of the radio.

She watched him start the car and put it in gear. ‘You're going to get us bogged,' she said with a matter-of-factness that she hoped would irritate him. ‘I'm not getting out to help. There's no reason why you can't wait for him here.' Rankin was not listening to her. She knew that. After a second or two she added, ‘You just don't want to admit that you need him,' getting to the heart of the matter without considering the remark of any significance beyond the moment—the fate of others was of no interest to her. ‘So we all have to get stuck out here for hours in this filthy black mud with you.' She was finding reasons for her anger.

As the car moved off she looked out the side window. She was repelled by the emptiness of the landscape—it was a landscape in which nothing ever changed and in which nothing could ever happen, a landscape that seemed to deny the passage of time and the possibility of change. It was a landscape on which not one sign of the struggles—nor even of the existence—of the whole human race had ever been permanently registered. She was seeing it for the first time. The car bumped something, and she said, ‘Shit, I'll be glad when I'm gone!' She wanted to provoke her father, knowing how intensely it irritated him whenever she swore.

She had begun to feel just a little afraid of the country of her birth; the thought of the return to the station and to her family was making her skin creep. Her father would be left in no doubt about the way she felt. He had refused her request to stay in town with her cousins until it was time for her to go to boarding school in Rockhampton: this had intensified to an unbearable degree her desire to be gone. She could not now begin to imagine how she had ever considered the station a tolerable place to live. The coast and the busy streets of Rockhampton seemed like a haven that she must reach soon or else suffer some irreparable setback in her life.

The big blue car accelerated uncertainly along the gravelled road, then bounded and swooped as it dived from the made section into the uneven tracks. Janet bumped her head on the window and grabbed the door handle to steady herself. ‘Jesus you're stupid!' she shouted.

Rankin blinked and concentrated. He was hunched forward, his flat-brimmed hat pushed to the back of his head, a long grey wisp of hair trailing over one ear. Dark sunspots stretched tightly on the backs of his hands gripping the wheel—as if his skin had made a pathetically inadequate attempt to turn black in response to the incessant sunlight. He scanned the difficult and confusing ground ahead—the sound of the grass scraping against the underbelly of the car seemed to him to imitate exactly the dry whisperings of his anxieties, and prevented him from concentrating fully on the driving. As it struck the cross-tracks the car lurched and the steering wheel spun violently one way then the other, as if the machine itself had panicked.

‘That's just what I mean!' Janet exclaimed contemptuously, hanging on with both hands and wondering how it was possible for someone to have lived for as long as her father had without managing to get his behaviour decently organised: it was exactly this crushing incompetence she wished to escape from.

From a corner of the back seat, seeming to drowse, his eyes almost closed, Alistair intently observed his father. He was willing Rankin to bring the car through the mud safely, detesting the possibility that they would be found helplessly bogged in an hour or two by Robert Crofts. Unconsciously, Alistair's tense features mimicked his father's. The car splashed through the water then hesitated as it emerged on the other side and poised on the lip, the rear wheels hissing on the slippery surface. It almost stopped. All three occupants leaned forward.

‘Come on! Come on!' Rankin prayed. The car inched forward, crawling unwillingly out of the mud, as if it would sooner have stayed there for ever. After an interminable struggle it suddenly picked up speed and went sliding and swerving down the tracks.

‘For Christ's sake keep it going!' Janet ordered him harshly, wishing there were some way for her to force her father into being efficient.

Alistair's gaze settled on her for an instant, then moved again to his father. He was not yet able to face the fact that his sister had betrayed him. She had cheerfully discarded—as if it had all really been no more than a passing entertainment for her—everything that they had held sacred and secret between them. During the last few weeks every good thing in his life seemed to have been knocked violently out of his reach—even Gil had no longer been of any use to him. It was a blight and he saw Robert Crofts as the sole malicious cause. Now, without actually realising it, he was beginning to look to his father as a last possible ally against the influence of Crofts, whose purpose was clear to him.

As Rankin manoeuvred the Ford over the low-lying stretch of country he was nervously considering the implications of Crofts' smile the previous evening but one, when Janet had brought out the boxing trophy. He knew he should have dealt with Janet's shouting and swearing at him. But she had changed lately and he no longer knew what to say to her. He lacked the resolve to tackle her head-on. His words might have no effect. So he said nothing.

He didn't want to compulsively dwell on that little scene at the dinner table, when Robert had raised his glass to him and, without guile, had offered him his gratitude for the win over Laurie Hill. It was then he had given him that encouraging smile—Rankin had reviewed it so often, however, that he had lost its exact image and was now dealing with guesses and imperfect memories. He couldn't help it. The minute he managed to dismiss it from his thoughts he was at once reminded of it again because of the questions that continued to hang over it. His head ached with irresolution. Testing things out a bit further would depend on his new plan.

Suddenly they were through the black soil and approaching the crossing. He breathed a sigh of relief. Ten minutes later they arrived at the homestead. He drove into the shed and pulled up alongside the jeep. Alistair and Janet got out and made straight for the house. Rankin yelled at the dogs to shut up and went round and opened the boot, which was full of cartons and packages. He felt very pleased with himself. Not a sign of Robert. He had stolen a march on the boy at last. Rankin took the mail bag in one hand, hefted a carton of whiskey under his other arm, and headed for the house. The day had begun exceedingly well after all, he considered. He met the stockman hurrying down the back steps.

‘There's a heap more in the boot, Robert. Bring it up will you?' He continued on up the steps. ‘I'll send Alistair to give you a hand—the lazy bugger.' Suddenly he felt sure that everything was going to work out beautifully. He felt firmly in control of the situation. In a matter of seconds he had convinced himself that he had taken the initiative, while everyone else had dithered—though in fact he had done nothing of the kind. He called to Alistair to go and help unload the car and went straight through to his own room in the middle of the house. He deposited the mail bag on his desk and the carton of whiskey next to the cupboard. He stood up, stretched his shoulders, breathed deeply, then lit a cigarette. He had not failed to register the fact that even though the stockman was looking tired and fussed, he had—in the brief instant of their meeting on the stairs—seemed relieved to see him and keener than ever to help. Rankin heard Ida and Janet begin shouting at each other at the other end of the house. He went over and closed the door, shutting out the irritating sounds. He had things to do.

•

Later, in the afternoon, when the house was quiet once again, the inhabitants each off somewhere about their own business, Ida stood at the draining board preparing dinner. The window in front of her was wide open and she was conscious of the birds, which were chattering noisily and hopping about in the oleanders as usual. Another storm was brewing and the distant reverberations of thunder were continuous. Ida was very glad to be alone. Ward had emerged from his room briefly and eaten a light lunch an hour or two ago. He had given her a couple of letters that had arrived in the mail for her and had returned to his room with scarcely a word of conversation. His preoccupation with his own thoughts had not bothered her, however, for while it had been an extremely close thing that morning, it was plain to Ida that her husband suspected nothing. Robert had taken the truck after lunch and gone up to the old fence as if everything were normal. He was there now. She was thinking about him, picturing him alone in the wattle scrub struggling with the entangled wire. She was deep in her own thoughts when, for some reason, she turned and looked towards the verandah door behind her. Alistair was standing there watching her.