The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  Herbert smiled ruefully. “And what became of all these fevered people?”

  “They died, or they got saved by the love of a good woman.”

  In a way, it was quite as awful a thing to say as telling a story about the Great Snake Ancestor at the dinner table just when snakes were the most unmentionable thing in the world. The love of a good woman was something lost to them both for ever. But tonight, from all around them in the dark came a crackling sound of parakeelya plants and desert peas absorbing the brief rain, spreading, swelling, reaching out shoots. Tomorrow the ground would be cloaked in a coat of purple and red. For a little while the whole landscape would be a riot of brightness. Tonight, even the truth was allowed.

  Herbert found on his plate some recognizable animal part that made him set his dinner aside. “Do not make excuses for me, my love. The piper must be paid. As soon as we are home, I shall write an accurate account of events and send it to the Superintendent, along with my resignation.”

  Comity caught her breath. A fear went through her so shrill and clamorous that for the first time, she caught a glimpse of what her father felt when he saw the stars massing. She realized she was afraid – petrified – of leaving Kinkindele and its edgeless, circling emptiness. What, leave Fred when she had only just got him back? Live in the real world rather than inside the shelter she had built of stories, fantasies? It made her stomach cramp and her throat close and puffballs of darkness swell and explode inside her eyelids. She must rise above it – the embroidery on the wall at Telegraph House said so. But go to Adelaide? To a home with no machine room? To live without the rattle of Morse peppering her days and nights with letters? It would be like losing her own heartbeat. Her mother was buried at Kinkindele! Must they leave her there, alone in the ground, with strangers walking over her grave? Comity felt sick and sweaty and helpless and filleted of all grown-upness.

  “Oh please, Father! Do not tell Superintendent Bligh I called his children noxious!”

  “Well no, naturally I shall be selective in what I say…”

  “Well then, Henry old chap,” Mr. Boyce broke in, “while you are ‘being selective’, could you not mention my part in this? Or I too will have to resign. Selfish, I know, but I love my work.”

  “I know that, Jack…”

  “And selfishness aside…Fred and Moosa might also pay dear for helping me out in my lie back there.”

  “Oh, I think—” began Herbert.

  “Also, if they jail you, your girl will certainly be thrown on the mercy of the Bligh family.”

  “Oh, Father!”

  Fred dodged lightly in from the shadows to retrieve the leftover lizard. He took the opportunity to say in Comity’s ear, in a stage whisper, “If your old man go to prison, you come live in my gunyah.”

  Herbert Pinny studied the boy crouching by his daughter, a half-eaten lizard in his hand. As they healed, the muscles in Fred’s chest had knitted up shorter than before, so that one scarred shoulder was raised higher than the other. Suddenly the red moon overhead was a bullet wound in a black chest, reproaching Herbert for his uselessness. That Fred should offer to take care of his daughter was the greatest reproach of all. Pinny felt his hands begin to shake, his back teeth to grind. Overhead the stars were sharpening themselves to points, taking aim on him… Perhaps Comity would be better off with her cousins in Adelaide.

  “How did you get here, Pa?” asked Comity suddenly. “Fred’s got magic ancestors to help. But how did you manage it? With the stars looking, and all.”

  The question took him unawares. “What do you mean, girl? How could I not?”

  Herbert remembered struggling up out of the treacly trance Comity had put him in with her pituri juice; remembered swimming up towards daylight, like a wasp in a tin of syrup. He remembered the sound of Jack Boyce and Comity discussing him.

  “The first thing I heard as I woke was my daughter’s voice, explaining why she had drugged me. For fear I would murder her. What horror could the world hold for me after that? Kill my daughter? How could she think that? I am her father! From the day she was born, it was for me to keep her safe. Throw myself bodily on snakes! Hold open the jaws of wild dogs with my bare hands. Drink up floods if necessary. If the Flinders Mountains take it into their heads to stampede over the desert now, this minute, it is for me to head them off! Is her mother dead? Then I must be mother and father to her! Is every nation in the world at war? Then I must bang their heads together and send them to their rooms. Is Australia on fire? Then I must tie a line to it and tow it to Antarctica behind a rowing boat, and douse it with snow! What horror compares with NOT keeping my daughter safe?

  “So I cursed myself, as I deserved to be cursed, and I wrapped my head in that curse, as Moosa there binds his, and I came along after you. And when my demons came out to threaten me, I shouted them down. Want to pelt me, do you, stars? I’ll blow you out like candles. Those walls of rock waiting to clash on me like cymbals – let them. I’ve felt worse. Look, that cheese-wire horizon waiting to slice off my head – wait your turn: there are people ahead of you in the queue with better reasons. Sky, you want to stifle me like a bird in a bell jar? Try it: I can hold my breath as long as it takes. As long as it takes to see my girl safe again. You faceless things in the shadows, come round where I can see you and I’ll spit in your eye! You cannot be uglier than what I see when I look in the shaving mirror. Let God desert me, before I ever let her down again…

  “And you know what? They held off. They thought twice. I suppose they had never seen a monster as great as me. A father whose daughter fears he might murder her and bury her in the yard? That’s horror enough to sour the Milky Way.”

  The eaves of the sky were emptying of dust. Soon the moon wore only a vestige of red, like a blush in both cheeks. The stars, like flocking gullahs, seemed a hopeful, cheerful sign of life. Herbert Pinny’s hands stopped shaking. His heart expanded, as parakeelya flowers do after a shower of rain.

  “You ever do awake-dreaming, Pa Pinny?” asked Fred. It was outrageously impertinent. It was cheeky beyond belief.

  “Fred!” said Comity.

  But Mr. Pinny was not offended. “Sometimes I pretend Mrs. Pinny is still alive. Out of the room, merely. Topping up a battery. Or putting a splint on a chicken’s leg. Or sewing her quilt.”

  “Splendid first-rate,” said Fred. He looked over at Moosa and asked the same question. Moosa shook his head: he did not do daydreaming.

  “Yes you do, Moosa,” said Comity. “You dream of the Governor of Australia sitting down to breakfast and saying ‘Bring me some of Moosa Rasul’s excellent date marmalade!’”

  “How do you know this?” said Moosa, sitting bolt upright.

  Nice Mr. Boyce cleared his throat. “I confess that sometimes I pretend I stole Mary Triggers from Herbert Pinny on the day of their wedding, and eloped with her to Tasmania on a fishing boat. I do apologize old chap, but she really was the sweetest girl in Adelaide. I know I never stood a chance beside you, but one can dream.”

  “The Missus liked stories bigly,” said Fred, sly as a dingo. “We should to make up story special for the Missus. Make her happy.”

  They turned to look at him, skinny, frail and gawky as a joey fallen from a kangaroo’s pouch.

  “Fred Waters, you are the Tempter in the Garden of Eden,” said Herbert Pinny.

  Fred nibbled on his lizard contentedly. “Sorry? Pagan me. Not know Bible, me. Verily.”

  That night they put together a story between them. Not an ancient tale, old as the world, such as you might hear at a corroboree. This was a new story. A story of what might have been.

  It was the story of a terrible illness. An illness that struck down six good men and the Stationmaster’s wife in the course of a single night. The Stationmaster only survived because he happened to be away from home, preventing a war.

  Seven well-tended graves look much like seven graves newly dug. Who was to say when those in the graves had died, or what had killed them? …Wel
l, to be honest, any one of the stockmen or cameleers could have told. But they would not. They would not put the lie to Herbert Pinny’s story. Both Aboriginal and ghan can swallow secrets, as the desert swallows rain.

  The British-Australian Telegraph Company were appalled by the news of seven sudden deaths at Kinkindele. They sent their most profound regrets. Herbert sent his own, to the families of Amos and Hart and Cage and Smith and Sankey, couched in words as raw and grief-filled as if their deaths had happened only hours before. The pain, after all, had been weighing on his conscience for months, heavy as a piano.

  Nice Mr. Boyce confided nothing to his wife of what he had found at Kinkindele, and not much about the excitements that had followed. He had a feeling that, if he did tell her, she would never let him put on baggy trousers and go upcountry again to sleep under the stars.

  When, one day, local carriers delivered a lame camel to his door, he smothered his astonishment, read the letter that came with the delivery – Your purchase, sir. The sweets prevailed. Allah is good. Moosa Rasul – and told his wife that the camel was a gift from an old friend.

  His wife wanted to butcher it for camel steak, but Mr. Boyce widened his eyes at her in a way that silenced her instantly. He fenced off a paddock and bought a donkey as company for his pet camel.

  The Blighs did come to Kinkindele. Shaken by the shocking news of all those deaths at Station Four, Aunt Berenice felt obliged to visit her sister’s grave and to make Herbert Pinny feel the full weight of her family’s disappointment in him. She brought her children too, of course, their suitcases full of contempt and smugness. Alexander, Anne and Albert looked around them from the steps of the carriage, lips curled with disdain. Just as they had thought: no fountains, no pony jumps, no emus roosting on the roof, no dam.

  “Goodness! You never believed all that, did you?” said Comity with a happy, hiccupping little laugh. “In your letters you seemed to be having such a dull time. I thought you needed some stories to cheer you up.”

  Someone else in the carriage was slower to get down – someone so frail and black-clad that, in the dark interior, she could have been mistaken for a forgotten umbrella.

  “You are Grandma Triggers,” Comity said in astonishment, and helped her down the steps. Here was a worrying surprise: the Blighs had announced their coming, but they had said nothing of bringing Mary’s mother too. In her panic, Comity could not remember: how long was it since she had written to her grandmother? What nonsense had she last invented while pretending Mary Pinny was still alive? What and when (if ever) had Grandma Triggers written back?

  “How is the knitting?” Comity asked, to stave off any subject more upsetting. “I knit, look.” And she pulled free the knitting needles that were fastening up her hair.

  “Arthritis forbids it these days, my dear,” said the old lady, fingering the coil of hair that had fallen onto Comity’s shoulder. “Just the colour of Mary’s,” she said. “…And how is Ivanhoe?”

  They were standing where the washing had once hung, Comity almost on the spot where the wash basket had stood, where Hogg’s pitch-and-toss stones had cracked together, where she had dragged her mother’s window boxes so as to prop up grave boards and keep the ghosts away.

  “I made Ivanhoe up,” said Comity.

  “I know.”

  How strange. It must be inherited. Her mother had had it. And Mary must have inherited it from her mother: the art of reading between the lines.

  “I knew from your very first letter… Do you suppose a mother does not know when her own daughter…I suppose you wished to spare me pain?”

  “Yes,” said Comity. “And no.”

  She hoped it was inherited – that she had inherited it – that thing both mother and grandmother could do (apart from knitting): the art of saying things without speaking them out loud.

  “I would have come before. But the sadness of it…made me unwell. Sadness can do that, Comity.”

  “I know. Brain fever. It did that to Papa.”

  “Ah. And is he recovered?”

  “Oh yes, quite recovered, almost.” She looked at her grandmother – tried to look and look and look her words clear into the old lady’s head: Do not say Mama has been dead for a year. Do not give him away. Do not call him a liar. “Well, Mama has been gone only a few weeks, Grandma, but we are trying to be brave.”

  “Of course,” said Grandma Triggers. “Of course.”

  The others were calling to them from the verandah. Aunt Berenice was sending the children back to chivvy their grandmother.

  “One day soon we shall have a good talk about it. And you can tell me it all. Exactly as it happened?”

  “Yes, of course! Naturally!” said Comity. “Soon. One day. Of course. Yes. Probably. Possibly.”

  At dinner the subject arose, of course, of Comity returning to Adelaide to live with the Blighs.

  “I need her with me,” said Herbert. “She is my great abiding joy.”

  “We need each other,” said Comity.

  Aunt Berenice shifted irritably in her chair and frowned at Comity for interrupting a conversation between adults. “Yes, but we must not be selfish at a time like this, Herbert. Look at the child. She is barely civilized. Why, you are not even able to dress her in mourning for her own mother!”

  “For whom should we wear it? Each other?” enquired Herbert. “We have no need to remind each other of what we have lost.”

  The Bligh children smirked at Comity across the table. Anne crooked her little finger as she lifted her teacup, to show how civilized she was herself. “You may live with us if you care to, Comity. I can teach you how to play the piano.” “Pi-ar-no” was how she said it. “I am very gifted at the pi-ar-no, you know.”

  Anne’s brothers glared at her. They did not want another girl in the house: one was bad enough. Alexander hurriedly suggested, “She would probably be too scared to live in the city. She would not know how to use a knife and fork – or flush a real toilet.”

  Comity looked at them thoughtfully for a moment or two before leaning forward as if to confide a secret. “I will go back to Adelaide one day. Not yet, but I will go back. I mean to train as a Morse operator.” Her father dropped his soup spoon. Her grandmother merely inclined her head and declared it “an interesting and useful profession”.

  “Girls cannot do that,” said Albert flatly. “They are too feather-brained. Father says. And he is Superintendent of Telegraphs.”

  Comity helped herself to a little more date chutney. “In that case, I shall go to Scotland,” she said, “where Grandpa came from. I heard it is more civilized than Adelaide. So the Superintendents might be cleverer.”

  Aunt Berenice had no chance to give her a telling-off before Alexander gave a hoggish snort of laughter: “What and leave poor ‘Prince Frederick’? You would break poor Prince Frederick’s heart! Or did he go out sailing and get drowned in the Sea?” It was said so snidely that even Aunt Berenice was embarrassed and scowled at her three children, snickering and sniggering into their hands.

  Comity blushed. The parlour seemed unpleasantly full, stifling and oppressive. Luckily, her grandmother answered for her.

  “Oh, and do you care to see the Sea, children? I believe Prince Frederick may be in Prussia at present, buying cossacks, but I am sure Comity could take you there this afternoon. Mary wrote of it in her letters and I confess I was intrigued. I am only sorry my old bones are not equal to the walk.”

  “I am sorry too, Grandma. I would like to have shown you,” said Comity, with a graciousness so like her mother that Herbert and Grandma Triggers exchanged a bittersweet glance.

  Confused and resentful, the Bligh children fell in behind Comity who, in her new boots and armed with her father’s walking cane, walked so fast that they had to trot to keep up.

  “Why do you wear ditting deedles in your hair?” said Albert through swollen adenoids.

  “They are my totem,” said Comity. “Our stockmen have a bandicoot totem. In the Dreamtime the
ir ancestor was a bandicoot. Mine knitted.”

  “And what, pray, is a bandicoot?” gasped Anne, breathless and sweating. But she lost interest in the answer as she caught sight of her first scorpion.

  Already Comity had pointed out a rat-like thing as big as a rabbit, horned beetles, fleshy white grubs, and one bird butchering another bird in the vilest way imaginable. Introduced to a carnivorous plant, Albert had tried to push Anne’s finger into its funnel of poison, so she was not speaking to him any more. Alexander had demanded to see where the camel had kicked Comity, and sunk into a sulk when she was able to show him the scar.

  “Is it much farther?” he said now. “This walking is tedious.” He was doing his best to appear rugged and bored, but the swirls of spinifex grass had sawtooth edges and he had brushed his ankles against so many that he urgently wanted to cry. “I cannot hear seagulls,” he added sarcastically.

  “Oh!” Comity put her hands to her chest and gasped with theatrical alarm. “I hope you are not expecting waves and fishing boats! That would be absurd! The ocean dried up an age ago. Before Noah died, I should think.”

  Then she went on to show them ammonites and seashells, skeletons of fish as delicate as tiny harps; the teeth of shark and the fronded ghosts of coral-plumes preserved for ever inside the rocks.

  The galling notion began to grow in the Blighs that their cousin was neither mad nor a fibber. What with the frightening things she seemed to know, and the torrent of local stories she loosed over them – “…and then one day a flood of nectar washed the bandicoots out of hell and into a mulga thicket…” – they barely dared to query anything that spilled from her mouth. After all, standing on a seabed in the Middle of Nowhere makes almost anything possible.

  But little Albert saw his chance at last, when Comity showed them the Aboriginal paintings in the caves beside the dry sea. He drew from his pocket a purse of coloured crayons and declared that he could do better.

  “No. These are sacred pictures, Albert,” said Comity. “They have magic.”