Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (6 page)

Rankin was struggling to rip off his boots and his thick moleskins, but time was passing with the sluggishness of a nightmare; it was as if a force-field were operating against his every movement. Then the blow struck him. There was no pain. He was running now, towards the water—although something like that earlier flicker of clarity that had resisted the fantasies of his journey was questioning how Crofts could possibly have got out there. There was a gap somewhere in time. It had opened up when Crofts had cried out. Something was missing. He tore off his clothes and ran forward, sinking suddenly to his knees in a viscous paste of grey clay, still metres from the water's edge. He struggled forward into the sucking mire, half crawling, half dragging himself, his white back glazed and opalescent under the hammering sun. Each step forward rendered the next even more difficult, until he was forced down like a broken-backed dog, squirming towards the water. Naked, he floundered out further into the hot slime, finally propelling himself into the water with swimming and kicking motions. He was dragging breath in panic-stricken gasps now as he struck out towards the still form which seemed much further away than it had from the bank.

As Rankin thrashed through the glistening water, the air around him grew thickly sweet with the nauseating stench of carrion. He was gulping water mixed with air and his legs drooped lower and lower behind him as his strength began to give out. He was further out now, but he had lost his sense of direction. In his mind's only quiet recess of clarity he knew that he was drowning. He knew that he was drowning and that Crofts was already dead. As he thrashed impotently at the surface of the water, stirring it into a flash of sunlit agitation, his daughter's face appeared before him, her black hair clinging wetly around her fine features, and he recalled the sudden drag on his heart when she had said, ‘He's gone.' And he understood then that it was hopeless for him and that he hated the drowned stockman with a hatred he thought he had reserved exclusively for his own soul. Ward Rankin called out his daughter's name. Then his hand touched a bone and his grip tightened on it like a vice.

•

When the truck had unexpectedly ridden up on the log and stalled, Crofts was taken off-guard. He had tripped over the last bundle of droppers and gashed his shin on a coil of barbed wire, then he had leapt from the body of the truck in order to save himself from falling awkwardly. His yell was one of pain and accumulated frustration as he landed safely on the ground. He had landed in the shade, between the tilted tray of the truck and the windrow. Dangling in front of his eyes, less than a foot away, was one of the canvas water bags they had strapped to the chassis early this morning. Crofts made himself comfortable and tipped a good quantity of the water over his head and face before taking a long, deep drink. The impact of the chilled water on his overheated stomach, however, gave him an agonising bout of the gripes. He hugged his knees and rocked himself backwards and forwards for a good ten minutes, concentrating on the gradually subsiding pain.

When the stockman at last emerged from the shade of the tray to take a look around, he wasn't surprised not to find his boss—who knew what a man like Ward Rankin might get up to? It looked as though the truck would need to be jacked up and possibly winched back onto the track. He couldn't see why Rankin had driven way over here anyway. He decided then to take a look at the earth tank. From the lip of the parapet Crofts gazed down into the dazzling arena below him. On the far side of a muddy pool of water Ward Rankin was lying on his back, naked, his head almost under the water. The station owner was holding the carcass of a drowned pig with his outstretched hands. Crofts could see Rankin's ghastly dilemma: if he pushed more firmly against the carcass it would force his head into the mud and under the water, but if he released the pig it would suffocate him.

As he sprinted around the bank towards his boss, the stockman recalled an incident his mother had told him when he was a child. A woman had ripped off her clothes and run naked into the pond at the Green Man in Lewisham. No explanation for the woman's behaviour had ever been given, though there had been a great deal of speculation about it. The thought provided some comfort for Crofts—a sense at least that Rankin's behaviour might not be entirely without a precedent. The woman had not been rescued embracing a dead pig, it is true, but she
had
been rescued, and her behaviour afterwards had returned to normal. She had been pointed out to him in the street. From her appearance you would never have guessed. Her daughter had been in his class at school later and he had always watched her for signs of insanity but had never seen any.

On his way round the perimeter of the tank now, keeping well away from the deep mud near the water, Crofts noticed the station owner's clothes, half-trodden into the slime. His boss had clearly been in a hurry, if not in a panic, to get to the bloated carcass of the pig. The stockman doubted that there
was
a straightforward explanation. With Rankin there never seemed to be anyway. He was shocked, in a slightly detached way, by the sight of the station owner lying more than half-drowned in the slime beneath the stinking pig; but he was not deeply worried by it. He did not, after all, see himself spending an indefinite future with Rankin. He rescued him and that was that.

•

The following morning Ward Rankin awoke to the sound of his daughter singing an accompaniment to the radio from a distant part of the house. It was a still, already hot day outside. He sensed that he had slept for a long time and could not tell whether it was morning or late afternoon. He lay quietly, not moving, his thin body tense beneath the sheet. His eyes swam in and out of focus as he gazed through the gauze of the enveloping mosquito net. He was listening, not to the voice of his daughter, but to another, further off, more rhythmically insistent sound—the intermittent reverberation of a steel bar being driven repeatedly and with force into the earth. It was the sound of the stockman working at the shoeing area.

three

The stockman's accommodation on the Rankin station was a small unlined fibro-cement hut situated some way beyond the machinery shed and about twenty metres from the chook pen. Inside this regulation two-man quarters two iron-framed beds stood one either side of the door. On each bed there was a shabby mattress and one or two dark grey woollen blankets. There was just enough room between the beds for a narrow three-drawer chest, above which a single-paned window now stood wide open—to catch any chance movement in the dead air. A few pieces of clothing and a bridle hung from nails driven into the wall-studs here and there, and from the central beam of the ceiling a bare light bulb dangled on the end of a length of flex.

There was nothing in the hut that might have given a clue to the personality of its occupant—except perhaps an elegantly bound copy of
Gulliver's Travels,
lying discarded on the dirty floorboards under one of the beds. The floorboards extended out the door to form a tiny verandah which was pleasantly shaded by the glossy foliage of a large black bean tree, planted there more than thirty years ago by the station owner. Here Alistair Rankin was presently sitting with his back to one of the verandah posts. Cross-legged, with his arms folded tightly against his chest, he was rocking himself slowly from side to side and staring into the shadowy interior of the hut. His nervous gaze flicked repeatedly from his sister to the stockman and back to his sister again. The boy's eyes were narrowed with resentment and his lips moved silently, mouthing bitter promises.

Janet Rankin was lying on her back on the bed to the right of the door. She was flushed and in an expectant mood. She was wearing her usual summer outfit of a pair of thin cotton shorts and a shirt, with nothing underneath them. The shirt was open; it was more comfortable this way, she claimed reasonably, considering its mere presence enough of a compromise. She would have gone without it altogether if her mother had not seemed prepared lately to engage in a serious fight over how she was to dress. The fact that her mother had gone into Springtown this morning to meet her brother, Gil Sturgiss, at the train station and was not around to do any checking up, added considerably to the intensity of Janet Rankin's mood. Her mother, whose opinions and motives she considered hypocritical and self-interested, was not out of the way nearly often enough for the girl's liking.

The bare heel of Janet Rankin's right foot was poised on the raised knee of her left leg. Looped around her right big toe was a redhide thong that was attached to the thick end of a broken stockwhip. She had unplaited a good length of the whip from the thin end and was using the unravelled strands as make-believe reins. Raising her foot suddenly into the air and thrusting herself up and down on the bed, she roared, in a very good imitation of her father throwing a tantrum while managing a skittish horse. ‘Stea-dy! Steady you
fucking
mongrel!' She lashed at her foot with the strands of the whip and writhed about on the bunk, tiny beads of sweat glistening on her forehead and her stomach as she moved in and out of the deeper shadows close to the wall. ‘Useless fucking animal! Settle down before I shoot you, you bastard!' During her performance she kept glancing across at Crofts, checking on his response.

Although he was accustomed to hearing Janet Rankin swearing vigorously whenever her parents were out of earshot, the sudden violence of her words in the enclosed space of the hut made the stockman uncomfortable. He was sitting on the bunk opposite, wearing an old pair of khaki shorts and mending his jeans with a needle and thread. Apart from the deliberate movements of his hands with the needle he remained very still, his breathing shallow. He did not look at her, but instead glanced sideways out the door at her brother. Only after making this nervous check a few times did he finally allow himself to look at the girl.

She stopped moving the moment she saw his attention was on her, and in turn watched him. Her blatant pose invited him to look at her, insisted on it. She let him examine her in this way for several seconds; then, deciding that was enough, she put her hand down and tugged her shorts into place, at the same time bringing her legs together to sit up. She slipped the redhide loop off her toe and stood in front of Crofts in the narrow space between the beds, looking down at him, her breathing unsteady from her exertions.

The stockman carefully resumed sewing his jeans.

‘Well?' she demanded, her voice sharp with impatience. ‘That's how he goes isn't it?' The stockman forced the needle through the thick wad of denim at a seam before looking up.

‘That was very good, Janet,' he said lamely, glancing out the door at Alistair again, a nervous smile on his lips.

The minute she saw the expression in his eyes she wanted to laugh at him, so she screwed her face into a grimace instead and dangled the whip in his lap. ‘No it wasn't!' she snapped, jiggling the whip ends. ‘D'you still want this?'

He looked down at the dancing strands and grasped them in his hand to still their twitching movement. He hoped she wouldn't notice his unsteadiness. She held on, aware that the knuckles of his clenched fist were only a few centimetres away from a milky-blue vein that was pulsing quickly on the inside of her thigh. Neither of them moved. She could feel her brother's gaze fixed on them; she could feel his loathing, his jealousy of Crofts, and it made her all the more determined not to let go of the whip. She eased her feet a little wider apart and grasped the plaited leather shank firmly in both hands, as she leaned back a little. She kept her eyes on the tensed muscles of his upper arm as he resisted her weight. If she had inhabited a perfect world, in which unpleasant consequences for one's actions did not have to be endured, she would have bent forward and dug her teeth into that rounded muscle with all the strength of her jaws. It made her gums ache thinking about it—it was a pity there were other things on her mind.

She had felt rushed from the beginning of the day, as if there was not a moment to be lost, aware all the time in the back of her mind that her mother was driving home along the road with Gil, getting closer every minute. With their arrival everything would change, for all of them probably, but for herself certainly. She had known for some time that this was not to be like other Christmases. Life would not go back to normal after it was over. When Gil had gone once again—and life could never be normal as long as he was around—she would go herself, early in February, for ever most probably. Janet Rankin perceived this imminent change quite simply as part of the natural course of events in her life.

She did not know exactly what had taken place in the brigalow three weeks ago between her father and the stockman, but she intuited that it was something out of the ordinary, and she had not been surprised at all. The details were of no consequence; it had been for her the first of a series of incidents that had begun to rush them towards this Christmas, to converge on a time when many more things were bound to happen, but when all of them could not possibly happen in a peaceful way.

At thirteen Janet Rankin was experiencing the anxieties of an increasing urgency in the rhythm of her life. Nothing happened smoothly for her any longer—the more important the task she had to get done (and important tasks were multiplying around her at an alarming rate), the less time she had to get it done in. She was adjusting quite well to this faster tempo, but at this moment the approach of the car along the road was beginning to make her feel panicky, for she had something crucial to settle between herself and the stockman before her mother and Gil arrived to complicate the issue.

It was not going well.

She fixed her gaze on the patiently resisting muscles of Crofts' upper arm—preferring this to the distracting perplexities of his eyes—and pulled harder on the whip. A furious frustration began to mount in her as, despite herself, she recollected how, when he had arrived six months ago, she had felt compelled to come here to the hut. To see. To satisfy herself. Her curiosity had been irresistibly aroused by the way her father had spoken of him when the letter had arrived from the agent in Rockhampton. He had read it to himself twice, slowly, at the breakfast table, before folding it carefully and placing it at last on the cloth in front of him. Looking up at them all, he had smiled as if he had just gained an advantage over them. In telling them then of its contents the hint of self-congratulation in his voice had suggested—to her at any rate—a connection between this English boy and his own peculiar and very private intensities. She was startled. Detecting that note in her father's voice had sent a small bright shock into her brain—as if a switch had been thrown cutting her off from him.