Читать книгу Back of Sunset - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 11

A man sat in the shade of the veranda. He rose as the three men came in the screen door. He was tall and slim, dressed in a bright red shirt, pale blue denim trousers stuck into the tops of fancy riding-boots, a yellow neckerchief and a Stetson with a fancy braided chin-strap; only when he took off the hat did Stephen notice that he was a full-blooded aborigine.

“This is Charlie Pinjarra, me mate,” said Tristram. “We been together now about ten years. We’re heading down to Wattle Creek when we get the word.”

“G’day, Steve.” Charlie Pinjarra had a soft musical voice, one that sounded as if it might never have been raised in anger or protest. “Jack used to tell me a lot about your father.”

Stephen took the slim firm hand offered to him. It was the first time in twenty-five years he had shaken hands with a black man; another memory came back, of a boy’s farewell to a shy aboriginal child, one whose name he couldn’t remember. He was glad now of the dust on his face: it might help disguise the surprise he felt at the fact of Tristram’s mate being a black fellow. He had never been one for the Australian tradition of mateship, although he knew it was a bond that had often taken men into trouble and sometimes even death together. He had no colour prejudice that he knew of, but he had just taken it for granted that Tristram’s mate would be a white man.

“He’s always telling us about your dad,” said Covici, and a laugh rumbled out of him. “There are still a few old-timers up here who remember him. I’ll bet he’d be pleased to know you’ve come back to have a look at the Service. We have an easy time now compared to what he had to put up with in his day.”

It was a long time since Stephen had felt his father so close: the ghost of the tall bent man moved on the dark veranda, and Stephen felt a sudden wave of mixed love and shame, as if he owed a debt that his father had never claimed.

“It wasn’t so good when you first came up here,” said Tristram. “Eighteen years. A lot has happened in that time.”

Covici laughed again, waving a deprecating hand. He led the way into the house and showed Stephen to a spare bedroom. Stephen showered in the small cubicle at the rear of the house: three frogs shared the spray of water with him. He changed into shorts and sandals, wondering if Kate Brannigan would find him more presentable, and joined the other three men in the living-room. It was a large room but Covici, with his own bulk, and what he had collected in the room, had succeeded in making it look small. It was a room cluttered with Covici’s living: books, magazines, four pairs of boots, littered the floor. A pair of buffalo horns hung on one wall; on a shelf beneath was a human skull. An aboriginal shield hung on another wall, a stack of spears, like a sheaf of wheat, piled beneath it in a corner: in this room they did not look out of place, not in the least chi-chi. A huge gramophone stood in another corner, a mound of records on the floor beside it. A library of liquor bottles shared a bookshelf with some well-thumbed books: Scotch stood beside Scott, brandy beside Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

“I drink,” said Covici, pouring whisky into a medicine glass: a strong dose, Stephen noted, “but not to excess. This country is marked with the graves of men who drank to excess. Not that I can blame them.” He looked out the window, through the screen and the flies battling to get in, at the blazing country running away to the dancing mountains. “It’s a bastard of a country.”

“Stop laughing,” said Tristram. “Why do you stay up here if you hate it so much?”

“Because of the people,” said Covici, and took a long swallow of his whisky. “A doctor is interested in people, not the landscape. How do you think a doctor in the slums survives?” He looked at Stephen. “I worked in the slums of London for five years. Stepney in a December drizzle.” He shook his head. “That was a bastard of a country, too.”

“You’re English?” Stephen said.

“English mother, Italian father. I was intended for the Foreign Office. My father was a passionate Anglophile.” He shoved a sausage thumb in the tie that held up his shorts and pulled it away from his massive belly. “Old Etonian. My father nearly broke his naturalised stiff upper lip when I took up doctoring instead of diplomacy. My old schoolmaster still writes to me, though. He knew I was too soft in the head ever to make good as a diplomat.” He looked at his watch. “It’s nearly four o’clock, time for the afternoon schedule. Would you like to listen in, Steve?”

Stephen looked at Tristram and Charlie. “Go ahead,” said Tristram. “That’s what you’re up here for. Me and Charlie’ll look after ourselves. We’re staying to have tucker with you and the doc. They cook the best meals in the Kim-berleys here at the hospital.”

“I told you it was the best hotel in town,” Covici said, and laughed aloud: the room shook with his merriment, and the Old Etonian tie cut deep into his expanding belly. “Come on, Steve.”

Stephen rose and followed Covici. His father and mother had always called him Steve; he had begun calling himself Stephen only from the day of his graduation. He had not been able to visualise Dr. Steve McCabe, M.B.B.S., on a brass plate; patients looked for dignity, not informality. And Rona and her mother would never have thought of calling him Steve.

They crossed before the front of the hospital and went up the wooden steps to the veranda of the other cottage. A big room opened off the veranda; the door was wide open and they went straight in. Kate Brannigan looked up from a pile of telegrams as they entered.

“Just in time,” she said. “I thought you four men might have got round a bottle and forgotten all about the time.”

“Have I ever forgotten?” Covici said, and slapped a large hand against Kate’s rump. “You’d think I was a drunk, to hear you talk.”

“I have no time for drunks, you know that,” said Kate, and Stephen noticed the tinge of bitterness in her voice. “Do you drink, Dr. McCabe?”

Her bluntness surprised him. “Why, yes.” Then he looked at Covici, who gave him a warning wink, and back at her. “But not to excess. Nobody could call me a drunk.”

“You’ve just gone up in her estimation, then,” said Covici, and sat down before one of the two microphones on the table in the centre of the room. “Explain to him how all this works, Kate.”

“I thought he’d know,” Kate said. “Didn’t your father ever tell you about this?”

“It hurt my father to talk about his time up here,” Stephen said, and made no attempt to hide his rebuking of her: he couldn’t understand her hostility and he was getting tired of it. “He never got over the fact that he had to go back south because of my mother’s health.”

Kate flushed. “I–I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice was no longer calm and impersonal. “I–I have a habit of opening my trap too much.”

“It’s a habit we all have,” said Covici. “Nothing in the world opens quite so easily and readily as the human mouth. The freedom of speech isn’t quite the phrase to describe the looseness of the human tongue. I have twice been knocked cold because I opened my trap too much.”

Kate looked at the fat untidy man with gratitude and affection: a child might have looked at its father in the same way. Then she turned and walked to the wall, where two large maps were pinned. She raised her hand and for the first time Stephen saw the wedding ring on her finger.

“This map shows you our area in relation to the rest of Australia, and this one shows it in detail. This base has a radio range of 400 miles, and it is effective over a quarter of a million square miles – that’s equal to the size of France and almost as big as Texas. That’s Dr. Covici’s practice – anyone in that area can call in here on their transceivers and the doctor will go out to them. There are two of us here, another operator and myself – we go on the air six times a day, and one of us is always available in case of emergency. Each cattle and sheep station has its own transceiver, there are a few at various outposts such as the missions, and one or two prospectors and drovers have portable sets – we have seventy in all tuned in to us here, all tuned to our own wavelengths and frequencies. It’s like a radio-telephone exchange with everybody on the same party line.”

“Which means there is no privacy,” said Covici. “The base also handles all inland telegrams for the post office, so everyone knows everyone else’s business.” He picked up a telegram from the pile on the table. “Your wife threatening proceedings maintenance. That’s to the head stockman out at Spinifex Downs. I know his wife, a first-class bitch. Everyone up here will be on his side.”

“You’re not supposed to read the telegrams,” Kate said.

“When I go out to the stations, do you think the people there only talk to me about their aches and pains? I’m their father confessor, too.” He winked at Stephen. “It’s the only thing that makes the job worthwhile, the gossip and scandal.”

“It’s time to start,” said Kate, and at that moment a woman wearing a nursing sister’s veil came in the door.

“This is Matron Hudson,” Covici said. “Dr. McCabe, Grace.”

Grace Hudson was in her late thirties: her looks had managed to keep pace with her years, but only just: she had been pretty once but now she was only pleasantly attractive. A strand or two of hair peeped out from beneath the veil; Stephen couldn’t be sure whether it was blonde or grey or both. Her figure beneath the thin white uniform was good, if a little plump; Stephen had seen far worse even on novice nurses. He looked at her legs, that was where nurses went worst, but they were good, too. Then he saw Kate Brannigan looking at him and saw the hostility clearly on her face again before she turned away to the microphone in front of her.

“A young handsome doctor,” said Matron Hudson. “I thought they were only in films. The girls will be pleased.”

“What girls?” said Stephen, embarrassed.

“Pilcher and Scott, my two nurses. We’re all man-hungry up here, aren’t we, Kate?”

But Kate had switched on the transmitting set in front of her, and Stephen said, “I’m only here for three weeks.”

“I might have known it,” Grace Hudson said. “None of the eligible men ever stay long here. All we get are the fat old no-hopers.” She pressed Covici’s shoulder; she too looked at him with affection. “Why couldn’t you have been handsome, Doctor? Or even just stayed young?”

“Shut up, Matron,” said the fat old doctor, smiling at her, and waited while Kate began the radio schedule.

There were two sets of controls in front of Kate: one for transmitting and one for reception. She went about her work in a cool professional way: her voice was once more calm and impersonal.

“This is 7 KXQ, Flying Doctor Control Station Winnemincka. 7 KXQ Winnemincka. It is now four o-clock. Dr. Covici is here to take any medical calls. Over.”

A crackle of voices came into the room, and Kate shook her head. “There’s rain about somewhere. Listen to the static.”

“It’s bad up here in the Wet,” Grace Hudson said to Stephen. “It makes it difficult for Dr. Covici when he’s trying to make out symptoms through an earful of static. He’s got a miracle ear, though. I’ve heard him diagnose Hodgkins’ disease out of five minutes of crackle and whistle, and been right, too.”

“Come in, 7KV,” Kate said into her microphone, and nodded at Covici.

A woman’s voice, faint with distance, came out of the receiver. “This is 7KV, Doctor. It’s one of our blacks, he has a bad knee, Doctor. Fell off his horse yesterday. He has a temperature, just over the hundred, and the knee has begun to swell. Over.”

“That’s Kingaroy Station,” Hudson said to Stephen, and pointed to the map. “Two hundred and eighty miles from here. That’s Mrs. King. Has six kids, all of them delivered by Dr. Covici.”

Covici was saying, “Good afternoon, Mrs. King. What is the patient’s name? And his age? Over.”

The woman’s voice came back: “Half-bottle Turps.” And Covici, without a smile, wrote the name down on one of the register cards before him. “He’s twenty or thirty, somewhere in between, Doctor. You never can tell with the blacks.”

“Righto, Mrs. King. Give him some of the tablets, Number Sixty-two in the medical chest. Three a day, four hours between doses. He should also take half a teaspoonful of Number Thirty-six powder in a glass of water, also three times a day. Tell him to lie up and rest the knee. Report in again in three days, unless it gets worse in the meantime. How are the kids – all okay? Cheerio, Mrs. King.”

The medical calls went on, while Grace Hudson pointed out the locations on the map and offered terse descriptions of the people calling in. “One thing about people out here, they are prepared to help themselves, which is more than I can say for a lot of city patients I’ve attended. You find a few fools who won’t keep their medical chests up to date, but most of them stock them up as regularly as they do their larders. The Service went to a lot of trouble to devise the chest – we reckon it has everything in it that should cover any emergency. Everything from scalpels to laxatives. Open them anywhere is our motto. You’ll be going out with the doctor on some of his flights, won’t you?”

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Stephen, and was surprised to find that he meant it.

Then the medical session was over and Covici heaved his bulk up from his chair. “I’m doing my rounds in the hospital now. You want to come, Steve?”

Stephen looked at Kate, her head bent slightly forward as she read the telegram of a death into the microphone: the voice was just a little tighter now, as if striving for impersonal-ness, trying not to be touched by the death of a stranger, by the grief of someone she knew. “I’ll stay here a while,” Stephen said. “There’s more I’d like to know about this setup.”

Covici went out the door, saying he would see Stephen across at his own cottage. Grace Hudson hesitated for a moment, went to say something, then followed Covici out of the room. She had looked at Kate, and Stephen had recognised the look on her face. He all at once felt sorry for Hudson, that by staying a few minutes here in this room he could cause her to envy Kate. He remembered his mother and how little there was in life for women here in this country. A stranger, some new face to look at, to talk to, broke the drought of loneliness.

Kate finished calling her telegrams, took down some for dispatch, and switched off. She sat back in her chair, pushing her hair back from her forehead. Her hair was thick and black and she wore it longer than was the fashion down south. Perhaps fashion was late reaching here, had been too effete to make the journey into the wilderness. Then he saw the recent copy of Vogue on the nearby chair, and he knew that fashion, or vanity or whatever you liked to call it, could make the journey to the moon.

“I like the way you wear your hair.”

She looked at him with surprise and some suspicion. “You’re not going to get anywhere with me, Dr. McCabe. I’m not man-hungry, like Grace Hudson and the others.”

He was exasperated, sorry that he had stayed. “Look, Mrs. Brannigan—”

“I’m not Mrs. Brannigan.” She turned the ring on her finger without looking at it, an automatic gesture. “My married name was Peterson. I use my maiden name again.” Then she turned away, with one of the quick abrupt movements she had, like an awkward child. “Hello, Billy. They were looking for you out at the airdrome.”

The young man who had come in the door bore a startling resemblance to her. He had the same high wide cheekbones, the same soft dark eyes, the mouth that was full-lipped and a little too big; he was almost too good-looking for a man. He was nearly as tall as Stephen, but broader in the shoulders; despite his prettiness he would be able to look after himself. He was dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, long socks and the same sort of fancy riding-boots as Charlie Pinjarra had worn: he had his looks and he did his best to carry them off: he was a dasher, a boy for the girls. Even down south the women, man-hungry or not, would flock round him like birds round a man with a bag of crumbs. Stephen wondered to which one of the girls here in Winnemincka he handed out crumbs.

“I’m Billy Brannigan,” he said, and put out a hand; the other held a mouth-organ. “I’m Doc Covici’s pilot. Makes it a family affair, sorta. Me piloting the plane and Kate on the radio.” He sat negligently on the edge of the table: he had enough confidence for both himself and his sister. “So you’re from Sydney, eh? I’m going down there soon, I hope. I’m up for a job as a trainee on the big aircraft, the overseas stuff. That’s what I’m after! Flying the big stuff from Sydney to London, having something to do, somewhere to go when you’re off duty.” He looked out at the country beyond the window, at the shadows dribbling like pitch from the deserted castles of the hills: the only enemy here was the country itself. “I’ve spent all afternoon playing ‘St. Louis Blues’ to two gins. They think I’m better than Larry Adler.” He held up the mouth-organ and blew a quick chord on it. “I’m the darling of the gins of Winnemincka.”

“And the half-castes,” said Kate.

“Yeah, and the half-castes,” said her brother, and grinned: he was even confident enough not to resent his sister’s sneers. He looked back at Stephen. “Now you’ve seen Winnemincka, I suppose you can’t wait to get back to Sydney?”

“I’ve been here before. As a kid.”

“You want your head read, coming back,” said Bran-nigan, grinning. “I remember now, your old man was the Flying Doc here, wasn’t he? He knew a thing or two, going back south. When I get to Sydney, the only time I’ll see the bush again is when I fly over it. The higher the better.”

“It’s just as well Dad can’t hear you,” Kate said. “He’d be turning over in his grave.”

“This country put him in his grave,” said Brannigan, no longer smiling. “And Mum, too. See you later, Doc. I’ll buy you a grog down at the Coach and Horses.”

He went out of the room, cocky as the king of a small domain: he blew his own fanfare on the mouth-organ: “I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy.” There came a burst of laughter from some women in the garden: the gins hailing their darling, The King of Winnemincka,

“I don’t know whether I’ll be sorry or relieved to see him go south,” Kate said, as much to herself as to Stephen. “I’ve tried to look after him. And so has Jack Tristram—” She looked up at Stephen. “My mother died when Billy was born. There was no doctor here then, otherwise she might still be alive.”

“When was that?”

“In 1934. After your father went back, we had no doctor for eighteen months.”

So that was the reason for her hostility to him. “I don’t think you can blame my father for that. This country was killing my mother, too—”

“I’m not blaming your father!” She whirled away from him, her hands clenched. “Why do I always say the wrong thing? I’m for ever putting my foot in it – the things I’ve said to people over the air—” She gestured at the microphone. When she turned back Stephen saw that her eyes were darker still with tears. “I’m sorry, Dr. McCabe—”

“Stephen,” he said, then changed it, breaking a link in the chain of the immediate past: “Steve.”

“I get so angry with myself—” There was no hostility in her now; she looked suddenly young, looking for friendship. “My father used to tell me to count ten. I’ve even tried counting from ten backwards—” She smiled suddenly, altering the whole set of her face; all at once she was beautiful.

“When did your father die?”

“Eight years ago. He got lost while he was out cattle mustering with Jack and Charlie Pinjarra – he used to manage Brolga Downs. He’d lived here all his life, and yet he got lost. This country can do that to you. . It was a fortnight before they found him. The dingoes had eaten him,” she said, her voice calm and impersonal again: another death, another grief: she couldn’t control her tongue, but she had learned to control her emotions.

Stephen, Steve, was silent for a moment. Outside a crow cawed and a moment later landed with a scratch of claws on the water tank just outside the window. “Was Jack a friend of your father’s?”

She nodded. “Ever since, we’ve looked on Jack as our second father. Sometimes we haven’t seen him for months, then he comes back to Winnemincka and fusses over us more than Dad ever did. He doesn’t like to hear Billy talk like that – I mean about going south. But Billy isn’t the only one. It’s hard to get young people to stay up here. This is still pioneer country, and there aren’t any pioneers any more. All people think about to-day is security and easy money.”

That’s Jack talking, Steve thought. He looked down at the wedding ring on her finger. “Is your husband alive? Or was he another one killed by this country?”

“He was a city bloke.” The impersonalness went out of the voice; her lips twisted, almost as if she were tasting the bitterness in her mouth. “He never wanted any part of the Outback.”

“He’s down south?”

“He’s dead,” she said. “Down south, where he belonged. And where I didn’t.”

She spoke with venom of the south, as if it were another wilderness, a country that could kill even those who loved and trusted it.