Читать книгу Sorry Time - Anthony Maguire - Страница 9

CLARRIE AND NOELIE had retrieved their car, which now pulled up near the group sitting around the fire. The pair got out of the Falcon and lifted the kangaroo from the trunk, then carried it down the gloomy side passage of the house.

Chaseling was feeling very relaxed from the pituri, which he continued to chew like a ruminant with its cud. In his lap he was nursing a roll of canvas – the painting by the dreadlocked man, Lester. It was called Honey Ant Dreaming and Chaseling had purchased it for $200. Now Lester had just gone off to find another canvas, titled Perentie Dreaming, that he wanted to show him. Chaseling leaned back and gazed up at the night sky. It was like a divine revelation. There, laid out for him like the dots in Lester’s painting, were all the wonders of the cosmos. The sky was alive. A shooting star made a quick, flaring journey, then disappeared. The full moon hung overhead with a yellow ring surrounding it, a giant eye gazing down.

Something flashed low on the horizon. Chaseling shifted his gaze, to the line of black clouds moving in from the east. Every second or so, there were silver flickers of lightning.

‘It’s gonna rain, better get this fella cooking quick.’ It was Noelie, his hands gripping the tail of the road-killed roo while Clarrie clutched its forelegs. The animal had been skinned and gutted and its carcase was red, wet and glistening, as were the arms of the pair carrying it. They heaved the roo onto the fire, setting off an eruption of sparks.

With Noelie presiding, they carefully roasted the marsupial, turning it in the flames with a shovel every now and then. But they only let the kangaroo cook in the fiercely-blazing fire, the dial of the stove turned all the way up, so to speak, for a relatively brief time, no longer than ten minutes. Then they rolled it out onto an old sheet of corrugated iron. A bit later, once the flames were dying down to coals, they transferred the roo back into the pit, raking the embers so the carcase was half-buried in them.

Meanwhile, Chaseling found himself purchasing the Perentie Dreaming painting, so now there were two rolls of canvas in his lap. They would make excellent companion pieces on the wall of wherever he settled in Alice Springs. A stray spark settled on the edge of one of the canvas cylinders and he hurriedly brushed it away. ‘I’m going to stash these in my bag so they don’t get holes burned in them,’ he told Lester. He got up and took the canvases to Clarrie’s car.

After he returned to his spot at the fire pit, Cookie held out a battered enamel mug like a hostess offering a guest some canapés. ‘Honey ants,’ she said. ‘We dug ‘em up this afternoon.’

In the bottom of the cup was a squirming mass of ants with enormously-distended transparent, amber-coloured abdomens, the size of small marbles. From the tips of their dark heads to the end of the swollen abdomens, the insects were two and a half centimetres long.

Seeing Chaseling’s hesitation, Cookie said, ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ She reached into the mug and grabbed the head of an ant between forefinger and thumb, then lifted the insect bottom-upwards to her mouth before tilting her head back slightly and biting off the sac of nectar. ‘Mmmm!’ She ran her tongue round her lips. Flicking away the ant’s head and thorax, she held the cup out to Chaseling again.

His hand slowly moved forward. ‘They don’t bite, do they?

She flashed a reassuring smile. ‘No, Kumina.’

Throwing caution to the winds, he reached into the can and lifted out an ant by the head. The insect’s legs moved frantically as he lifted it to his mouth. ‘Bottoms up,’ he said, before biting off the abdomen, which burst like a fragile grape in his mouth. But because he had his head angled downwards, and the honey was a lot thinner in consistency than the bee variety, most of the nectar ran back between his teeth, then down his fingers.

Licking his fingers, Chaseling got a tantalizing taste of sweetness offset by a smoky tang. He tried a second ant, tilting his head back this time to prevent spillage. Warm nectar flooded his tongue and he savoured it for a couple of seconds before swallowing it down. He gave the thumbs-up sign to Cookie.

After treating himself to a third ant, Chaseling urged her to share the delicacies around with the others gathered around the fire. Throwing the remains of the dismembered insect into the ashes, he said, ‘I was wondering what happened to the mission. When I was over by Clarrie’s car, I saw some old concrete foundations. I thought maybe that was where the mission used to be.’

‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘What happened to the mission buildings?’

‘We burned ‘em down.’ she said. ‘After the nuns and the priests cleared out. We even burned down the church.’ Looking guilty, she made the sign of the cross. ‘There’d been too much cruelty, the mission had to go.’

She told him about the frightful abuse of children on the mission by a priest called Father Mahoney. ‘He went to jail in the end,’ she said. ‘I heard he died a few years back. Some of us mob celebrated. He was the Devil.’

Noelie and Clarrie rolled the kangaroo out of the fire onto a sheet of corrugated iron. Chaseling marvelled at how they were able to tread with bare feet on small embers at the edge of the fire pit without apparently feeling any discomfort. He thought how he’d like to touch the soles of their toughened, calloused feet, just to discover what they felt like. Bone? Sanded wood?

The roo was left to continue cooking in its own juices atop the iron sheet for another fifteen minutes or so. Then the ribbed sheet of metal became Clarrie’s cutting board as he sliced thick juicy slabs from the haunch and shoulder with an old but evidently very sharp wooden-handled knife. He put some of these aside for himself on the edge of the corrugated sheet and placed the rest of the prime cuts on an old tin plate which he handed to his father. Next to be served were Cookie and the elderly blind man. Then a procession of people appeared fireside with an assortment of plates and bowls. One of them was a sensational looking girl in a pink mini skirt and white T-shirt which set off the dark colour of her skin. She looked shyly across the fire at Chaseling before melting back into the darkness with a segment of roo tail on a tin plate.

Finally, just when Chaseling was starting to fear that he was going to be excluded from the feast, Clarrie motioned for him to come over to the other side of the fire pit. Despite being the last to be served, the portion dished up onto a plate-sized piece of cardboard was a generous one, thick slices from the top of the roo’s massive back legs. He returned to his position on the far side of the fire, where he took a piece of the dark, delicious-smelling meat and popped it into his mouth. He chewed tentatively, then greedily at the lean meat. It was tender, gamey and juicy, with a smoky aftertaste.

After dinner, Clarrie produced a battered-looking acoustic guitar. He started strumming, and even though the instrument had the top string missing, he managed to coax a good, tuneful sound from it. He played a rhythm which was part reggae, part country and part something else not so easily defined. Then he began singing in the Pitjantjatjara dialect. The old blind man hit two sticks together, producing a slow, hypnotic rhythm.

Chaseling closed his eyes as he listened, then opened them again as guitar, vocals and clap sticks were joined by a series a visceral, other-worldly sounds. Noelie had sat down alongside his son and was blowing into a two-metre long didgeridoo painted with images of animals and other tribal emblems.

Closing his eyes again, Chaseling reflected that this was the most relaxed and contented he had felt in a long time. For years, in fact. Since he’d started training to be a doctor.

Chaseling had an extremely retentive memory which had always helped him pass exams with a minimum of study. All the same, it had been a hard slog. Six years at the University of Sydney medical school, then another year as a hospital intern. He hadn’t had much of a life during that time. His existence had revolved around passing the next series of exams. Then when he’d started at the hospital, the challenge had been shifts which stretched for twelve hours. It was during such a shift that Chaseling had been caught in flagrante delicto with a nursing assistant in a storage room. They weren’t actually interrupted in the act; they’d finished their brief but intense coupling on the floor atop a makeshift bed of hospital gowns and they were getting dressed. A flushed and sweaty Chaseling was putting his foot into the leg of his trousers as the nurse, a petite blonde named Maria Vlasnik, was reaching behind her back to fasten a flesh-coloured bra.

The door suddenly opened and a male nursing assistant called Federico took a half step into the room before giving a gasp of surprise. Then his lips contorted in revulsion and he gave a little squeal of horror. ‘B-but, you’re married!’ he said to Maria.

‘Things haven’t been going well at home lately,’ she replied dismissively.

The male nurse’s eyes lingered on Maria’s cleavage as she bent down to retrieve her blue uniform shirt from the floor. Then he backed out of the room and slammed the door.

Federico hadn’t reported the incident but he’d gossiped about it. Maria was transferred away from the orthopaedic ward and word of the illicit union filtered up to Chaseling’s boss, the hospital’s head of orthopaedics, Professor Miles McManus.

McManus was an evil-tempered tyrant who routinely shouted at doctors and nurses in the wards and operating theatre. He had a very high opinion of himself and an almost uniformly low opinion of the junior doctors and nurses in his charge. For years, he’d got away with terrible bullying and sexual harassment. He fancied himself as a ladies’ man, sporting a thin, carefully trimmed moustache in the style of Hollywood heart throbs Clark Gable and Errol Flynn. Not so long ago, he’d been able to virtually take his pick of the young female doctors and nurses in his charge. But seemingly overnight, he’d grown old. And conventions had changed. These days, when he made sexual advances to the women in his workplace, they were invariably rebuffed. His last conquest, if it could be called that, had been a 61-year-old ward sister, who’d shown up for their romantic liaison with her face caked in makeup and her body squeezed into a dress two sizes and around thirty years too small. When he woke the next morning, McManus had looked across at the face of the snoring woman next to him lit up in the cold light of day – and reflected that she looked like some dreadful old whore.

And so when McManus heard how Chaseling had been caught half naked in the storeroom with the vivacious junior nurse, a woman who’d curtly rebuffed his own clumsy advances, the news made him bitter and he started singling Chaseling out for particularly vicious treatment.

In the operating theatre, McManus would snarl brusque commands to Chaseling from behind his surgical mask and find fault in everything he did. During ward rounds, he ignored him. Some of Chaseling’s colleagues sycophantically followed the professor’s lead and started treating Chaseling as a non-person, staring straight through him when they passed in the hospital corridor. It became a toxic workplace and he was hugely relieved when his internship came to an end.

But still McManus continued to haunt him. When Chaseling applied for jobs as an orthopaedic registrar at major hospitals in cities and provincial centres, he was continually rebuffed after the Professor was contacted and gave a damning assessment of Chaseling’s abilities. The only exception was Alice Springs Hospital, which had offered Chaseling a position after interviewing him via Skype. He didn’t know whether they had talked to McManus or not – probably not, although there was always the chance that the Professor had relished the idea of banishing him to the most isolated part of Australia and had thus finally given him a positive rap when contacted by the HR manager of Alice Springs Hospital.

Now, as he relaxed by the fire in the middle of the desert with his new friends, Chaseling reflected that what he’d considered to be an exile to central Australia was actually going to give him experiences that he’d never have in any city. Despite his car having been wrecked, he was relishing this adventure. He was living a life.

He stretched out sideways beside the fire, which had now all but lost its glow, just faint points of dull red light shining here and there in the otherwise dark embers. But the full moon provided a light bright enough to read by. Reclining with the edge of his head against his hand, his eyes took in a couple of empty food tins at the edge of the fire pit. They were rectangular shaped with rounded edges. Chaseling tilted his head to read the label. ‘CAMP PIE,’ it said.

Chaseling remembered Camp Pie from his boy scout days. Only by nomenclature was it related to the pie and its many manifestations, from Australia’s humble beef and gravy offering to gastronomic delights like Beef Wellington. Camp Pie was a variety of the reconstituted meat commonly known as spam. He suspected that it figured a lot more prominently in these peoples’ current diet than kangaroo or other traditional indigenous foods. At medical school he’d learned that poor diet was the prime reason for the shockingly high disease and mortality rates among Australia’s indigenous communities. The life expectancy of the people he was sitting with around the fire was something like ten years less than his.

What Chaseling didn’t know was that there was about to be a sudden jump in the local mortality rate here in St Catherine’s.