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My Darling
Earlier I’d caught some shrimp in an old twenty litre tin with holes in the bottom – obviously fashioned for the purpose – using a rotting carp I found on the bank as bait. Then I sat in a deckchair and caught yellowbelly; none big enough to keep for eating, though each one a little joy to catch. People in town told me big fish were being caught, but it was all the same to me.
A stand of old river gums shaded me from the afternoon sun and cautious budgerigars skittered down a dead limb in the water to drink. In the background I could hear linnets and brown treecreepers, and always the flow of the river, always the flow.
The water wasn’t quite the milky tea colour people speak of; more like slightly opaque milk coffee with a greenish tinge I’d be highly suspicious of in a cup of tea. Flotillas of water spiders skipped upstream while a gentle breeze rippled the surface. There was green pick along the banks.
As night fell I spread the fire and pan-fried a steak on the coals – excellent eye fillet from Dirranbandi – which I ate with steamed vegetables and a bottle of red wine. Then I went to bed as contented as any man and let the river lull me to sleep.
Sometimes I think I’m going feral. I’ve always been happy with my own company; lately I’ve been feeling like I’m no longer suited to polite society.
I used to seek out the company of men, now I think I get my fill of them in the course of doing my work. By day’s end I’m happy to walk away. We don’t need each other to survive.
I also used to crave the attentions of women, now I think I’ve grown out of them. I feel like I’ve graduated from the School of Testosterone – I wouldn’t say with honours, but certainly with enthusiasm – and now I’m free. Maybe my Corporate Hippy was right.
Of course all this might be nothing more serious than libido’s honest response to drought, and with one false move I’ll be right back into the fray; but right now I’m happy on the periphery. I’ve even got the show on a need-to-know basis with regards to my whereabouts: if Charlie asks where I am I tell him I’m at large. The nearest they get to knowing my where I am is by the location of my stories, which I don’t always file in order. I’m getting more like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now every day.
I do think about you all, though.
I think about my daughter and how she is facing the future, and my father and how he is nearing the end. I have imagined burying him, but I cannot allow myself to imagine the same of my daughter. Sometimes I horrify myself by thinking of harm coming to her and I must forcibly remove the thought from my head, it shakes me so. A week back I saw a large brown snake on the road, dead in the act of trying to swallow a spiny lizard of some sort, and I shuddered as I imagined Benino being bitten by a snake, then agonised for an hour trying to remember the treatment of choice for snakebite these days.*
I also think about the lessons some of you offered before I was ready to learn them, and shake my head in wonder at some of the truly stupid things I’ve done. And I think about the few pearls of wisdom I’ve managed to scrape together – a couple by design, most by accident, together not enough to make a bracelet for a child to wear – and try to imagine who might want them. (And usually draw a blank.)
And I think of people I have met along the way who have made an impact, good and bad, and wonder how they are these days. Mostly I wish them well. And by that I don’t mean most of them I wish well, and some I don’t; rather, most of the time I am big enough to wish them all well, and only on rare occasions does mean-spiritedness fill me with such devilish joy that I would have the bastards dead at my own hands.
I met an eighty-four year old woman yesterday who was managing a pub single-handed, and I asked her what she’d learned about people serving behind a bar.
“That there’s lovely, good things in most people,” she answered without hesitation, making me wonder if she ever has murderous thoughts. She doesn’t drink or smoke and refuses to have poker machines in the place because, she says, “There’s something in my conscience that won’t allow me to put poker machines in front of people who have a problem.”
But even a saint casts a shadow, and she admits to loving the horses and being a regular Saturday morning punter. Before she dies she wants to fly down to Melbourne for Derby Day and see the horses go round again.
She looks like Spike Milligan and tells me she’s proud of Australia. I ask her why.
“The beautiful country we live in. I love the peace. This western country; I love the contrasts between the red soil and the green, the beautiful trees, and the birds.”
“Are we going to bury you out the back?”
“Oh, yes,” she says with genuine enthusiasm, “out with the cattle and the sheep and the birds, underneath a coolibah tree, in a wool bale.”
Earlier in the day I’d met another lovely soul. He was a sheep grazier who just happened to have a small opal mining town spring up along a bore drain on his property. He tells me he didn’t mind until it had grown to about a hundred residents and it was brought to his attention that he was responsible for the whole settlement.
“Yeah, we all got on pretty well together,” he says, as if he’s talking about a gathering no larger than a couple of mates in the pub. “And they wanted an airstrip so I said, ‘Yeah, have a loan of the tractor; build yourselves an airstrip.’
“Anyway it gets to the stage where the flying doctor starts to visit and one day I got talking to the pilot, who asked me whose airstrip it was. So I told him the miners put it in but it was on my property, and he said, ‘You’d be responsible for this. If a plane goes down you’ll be out here digging a hole.’
“So I looked into it, and found out not only was I responsible for the airstrip but I was responsible for all the houses and everything else,” he says, laughing at the memory.
“Anyway, I panicked a bit, and jumped in the car and drove to Brisbane, and sold seven hundred acres and the bore to the Government, who then presented it to the local shire council and they took the responsibility.”
And he’s such an easy-going, likeable man you can well imagine how an entire community of a hundred or so people could develop in his front yard without it bothering him. He tells me a few stories about life as the accidental governor, but none more memorable than this:
“At this stage of the game I was a bachelor,” he begins, “and there was this woman with three little children turns up in the bottom paddock and sets up camp illegally, outside the main area.
“So I went to see the mining warden and he agreed that she had to move, but he was frightened to tell her because he’d already had a fair old fight with her over it. And I couldn’t get her to move. So in the end I thought I’d better try a civilised approach and invite her up to the house for tea.
“Anyway, that was thirty years ago,” he says. “And she still hasn’t left. She just upgraded her accommodation from the paddock to the house.”
It’s a sweet story he’s no doubt told many times, but his eyes sparkle when he delivers the punchline and you know he’d do it exactly the same way next time round.
When I leave he bids me safe travels, and warns me to watch out for illegal campers. I tell him I will, but sat out here in the firelight listening to the river pulse I can’t see any sort of camper anyplace near.
I decided on no tourniquet, immobilise affected limb, keep patient quiet, and drive like a banshee.
© Monte Dwyer 2008
