The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  Comity worried about him, worried how little he ate and how few recipes she knew. She worried whether the piano waiting patiently on the verandah would make him sadder indoors or out. She worried whether he had ordered more supplies, whether he ever slept. Her father told her he had asked Head Office for a new telegrapher, and a governess to continue Comity’s education, but she had no idea how long they would take to pack their cabin trunks and make the journey up from Adelaide.

  She took to fastening up her hair with a pencil that way Fred had done it, because “up” was more grown up. And she did so need to be grown up.

  The first time he saw her hair like this, Herbert Pinny uttered a cry and dropped a forkful of beans, reminded of his wife. The stationhands, too, looked strangely at her fastened-up hair and said how she would make someone “a proper little wife one day”, then glanced at each other. Cage turned chivalrous and offered to get the piano into Telegraph House.

  So, finally it came indoors, making about as much noise as an ox sliding down a mountainside in a tin bath. But once it was in the living room, Comity did not dare touch its keys or attempt to pick out a tune, for fear of upsetting her father. She covered it in a sheet and they both did their best to ignore it.

  At night, Comity lay in bed trying to decode the erratic beating of her heart. (She knew Morse, of course: her mother had taught it to her, along with the alphabet, ironing and simple fractions.) Sometimes Comity was sure she could make out letters – an H or an F or an S – and wondered if her mother was somehow signalling her from Heaven. She began to listen for an L, an O, a V, an E.

  “When will the new man be coming, Papa?” she asked one night, about six weeks after the funeral.

  He did not answer, scratching anxiously at a spot of grease on his trouser leg. When she offered to fetch a damp cloth, he only reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a pellet of paper.

  “A message came in today from your grandmother,” he said and unfolded the pellet, smoothing it, over and over and over, with the pepper pot, until it split down the creases. Comity went and picked it up before it was shredded past reading.

  MARY

  RECEIVED NO BIRTHDAY GREETING STOP

  HOPE ALL IS WELL STOP DID PIANO ARRIVE

  MOTHER

  Comity could almost smell the hurt feelings rising off the paper. On her sixtieth birthday, Grandma Triggers had not heard from her youngest daughter.

  “You did not tell Grandma?”

  Her father ran his tongue round his mouth as if looking for words lodged between his back teeth, but came up with no excuse. “You may write her a letter informing her.”

  “Me?”

  “A small enough kindness to do your grandmother, surely?” he said, returning to the stain on his trouser leg.

  “But could you not…?” Comity began.

  Her father folded his napkin six times, then went back to the machine room, leaving the supper on his plate, cold but not untouched. Each bean had been separated from every other, using the tines of his fork, so that each stood isolated in a desert of white china.

  Comity sat down to write the letter telling her grandmother that her daughter Mary was dead.

  Dear Grandmamma

  Happy birthday. We would have comunicatied before but were too sad

  Dear Grandmother,

  I hope you passed a pleasing birthday. Many apollogies for the lateness of this letter. Mother might have written but she

  Dear Grandmother Triggers

  Mama did not write becuase she is I thought Father wrote. I think Father did not write because he did not want to make you sad. Nor me.

  Dear Grandmother

  It is with great sorrow that we write to inform you that Mary Pinny your daughter passed away to a better place on account of a tiger snake in the wash basket and it happened before your birthday.

  Comity sharpened the pencil and started again:

  Dear Mama,

  I am sorry I missed your birthday. The Wire was down and the camel train did not come by. I hope you had a grand day. Sixty? It cannot be! I bet you are as beayutiful as ever you was.

  How are the cats? How is the nitting coming along? I am nitting a saddlecloth for dear Comity. Did I tell you she now has a snow-white pony with a star on his nose? She rides very well. Without stirrups even. The ponies name is Ivanhoe like in Ivanhoe which I was reading to Comity when

  The garden is looking a verittable paradise with a fountain and fish pool. Of a Sunday after church we take a picnic out there and eat mangroves.

  Mr Smith has a hurnia front and back, but I am sure he deserves it. I am very very well, but the washing line fell down in a heap which wasa sore bother.

  The piano came sound and safe on a camel with a big tank of water. Thank you thank you. Now I play each sunset. Motzart and those others. When we visit you one day we will make a birthday consert for you, dear Mamma.

  When the letter was done, Comity found she had leaned so hard on the pencil that readable words were gouged in the tabletop: pony dear well. Her jaw was stiff, her eyeballs dry, her finger dented from gripping the pencil so tightly. Comity twisted her hair upwards and refastened it with the pencil. For a few moments all had been well again. For a few minutes she had conjured up her mother, and her b-e-a-yutiful mother had (of course) thought up much better, happier things to say. Grandma Triggers need not be upset. Nobody need be upset.

  It was ridiculous, of course. The handwriting was nothing like Mary Pinny’s. The spelling was sure to be wrong here and there: not all the spelling rules were as easy to remember as b-e-a-yutiful.

  The very next time her father went to the outside toilet, Comity crept into the machine room to send a telegram to her grandmother telling her the truth:

  FONDEST BIRTHDAY WISHES BUT SAD NEWS TOO BAD FOR WORDS

  The necessary dots and dashes swarmed like ants through her head. The Morse key was smooth and pleasant to touch…

  “What are you doing, child?” Before she had tapped out one word, her father was standing behind her in the doorway.

  “You wanted me to—”

  “Were you meddling with the machine? You know never to touch the machine. Company Regulations…”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Must I lock the door to the machine room every time I visit the dunny? I think I should be able to trust my own daughter!”

  “Of course you can, Papa. …Would you like some berries mashed up in milk?”

  And then there was no time for second thoughts. The next day was Sunday, but Herbert Pinny did not turn up for Sunday service in the stationery store. They waited ten minutes for him, and Comity felt oddly irritated. She had been happy sitting in among the myrtle trees, feeding imaginary carrots to her imaginary pony Ivanhoe. She was angered, too, by the looks the men exchanged with each other; by the way her Sunday bonnet would not fit over her topknot; by the fact that Fred was not allowed to come in. The Light of the World still wore that smug look on His face. She picked up the Bible and read aloud from boring Leviticus. Serve them all right.

  As soon as Sunday service was over, she tore open the letter to Grandma Triggers and added a postscript.

  PS I spoke this letter out loud and Comity wrote it down. You most likely gessed this. I berned my fingers a little cooking and it pains me to write.

  Even as she signed her mother’s name, a cry went up outside of “Camels a-coming!” – a cry that invariably set her heart bouncing. Living on a station as remote as Kinkindele, the sight of outsiders brought wondrous possibilities…and also a kind of fear.

  Comity shook herself. What was she thinking of? This camel train would surely be bringing the replacement telegrapher! Quickly, she made lemonade, checked her hair in the speckled mirror by the door, and went out to greet the newcomer. “I prepared your bed, Mr. X,” she practised saying. “If there is anything you require…”

  The big barrel-chests of the camels bulged over the rail fence. The ghans turned their faces away the mom
ent she appeared. Comity would have loved to avert her eyes too, but she needed to spot the new telegrapher and say all the polite things she had thought up.

  But there was no telegrapher.

  There were only the ghans and their camels, and the flies that came with the camels, and the bales of cable, the hoof-trimmer, the porcelain insulators, banana saplings sent to Mary Pinny by nice Mr. Boyce at Repeater Station Three. There was a book in torn wrappings, which Mary Pinny had requested from the bookseller in Oodna. There was the usual fat envelope from Comity’s Aunt Berenice.

  But there was no telegrapher.

  Another month to wait. Another month of coping.

  Rise above it, her mother had always said. That’s why angels were given wings – to rise above life’s trials.

  She took the official papers indoors to her father. He had not so much as left his stool. He had not so much as stood up to greet his new assistant. He sat bent-backed over the desk, wearing his dapper black suit, the blinds lowered, the clock muffled up, to silence its tick. The fat yellow cable from the Morse machine coiled between his knees and emerged from under the stool. From behind, he looked for all the world like a giant rat, nibbling.

  “So…did you not send for a new assistant, Papa?”

  The giant rat swung round on its stool and attempted a smile. “We are well enough on our own, are we not, Comity? I think Kinkindele is able to manage without the cost of a second telegrapher.” His eyelids were red and rheumy. In rubbing them to stay awake, he had rubbed machine oil into his eyes, along with several eyelashes, and the whites had become inflamed. He looked almost as if he was weeping red gum.

  “Of course we can, Papa,” said Comity.

  She did not trouble to ask about the governess. After all, who ever wanted one of those in place of a mother?

  The letter to her grandmother weighed on Comity’s conscience. Lying was a terrible crime, she knew – one that would have made her mother angry. “Comity, I am as cross as the Scottish flag!”

  Comity did just remember her grandmother, but only as someone unapproachable, associated with itch. The unapproachable-ness came of the knitting needles forever waggling in Grandma’s hands. The itch came of the knitted garments she made for Comity. The clearest memory she had was of Grandma Triggers sitting very erect, strands of different colour wool stretching out in every direction – a grey spider-woman at the centre of a brilliant web.

  Wearing Grandma Triggers’s knitting had given Comity a lifelong sympathy for sheep, who had to go about always in woollen garments and could not even take them off when no one was looking. Grandma’s letters were filled with news of the things she was making. Even her handwriting looked as if it had been knitted in two-ply green ink. Adventure did not feature anywhere.

  The Triggers family had moved to Australia from Scotland. Adventures might have happened there. Perhaps Grandpa Triggers had been exciting before he died.

  “What did Grandpa Triggers do?” she asked. But her father had stopped answering questions.

  By contrast, Fred’s ancestors were unforgettable. Fred’s best ancestor had kept six smooth stones in his dillybag, and when he took them out and rubbed them in lizard fat they turned into sons who went out hunting for him and, while they were about it, taught everyone how to use throwing sticks and have babies. Fred himself carried six stones in his dillybag, probably to honour his ancestor. But then Fred carried a shrivelled-up dead bandicoot baby in his dillybag too, and he said that was “just in case”.

  Comity took to carrying a pair of knitting needles around with her, to honour her ancestors. But never wool.

  To hear Fred talk, you’d think all of his ancestors were still alive.

  And he knew about so many monsters and oddities! There were the mischievous Tuckonies, who played tricks on people; the min-min lights, which followed a person about. There were the Dhinnabarrada, who could turn you into an emu just by touching you; the Kadimakara, big as a house, which fell through a hole in the sky and couldn’t get back so had to get by on eating people; and the Devil-Devil, who ripped people limb from limb given half a chance… Fred talked about them as if they did not scare him at all. The only monsters Comity knew personally were the thorny devils (which only ate ants really) and the hideous spiders who hung themselves up in the barn. Tiger snakes, of course.

  And her cousins in Adelaide. The noxious Blighs.

  The camel train had brought a letter from them – the usual long letter from Aunt Berenice, praising her three marvellous children. In the past, there had been huge fun to be got from these letters, because Mother had read them out loud, imitating her sister’s snobby voice.

  “Last week Alexander was declared quite the best in his dance class… Papa entertained us last evening on the flute, while Anne accompanied him on the piano to delightful effect…”

  In fact Mary Pinny invented “Bligh letters” just to make them laugh at dinner time. “Alexander has learned to fly. Papa hollowed out his potato last evening at dinner and played the Hallelujah Chorus on it, while Anne improvised a harmony on the aspidistra. Dear little Albert…”

  When, through his laughter, Herbert suggested she was not being very sisterly, she retorted, “What? These are the people who sent us wine glasses for a wedding present, knowing full well that we do not drink! Huh to sisterly!”

  What unwitting joy Aunt Berenice had given with her braggarty letters. Now, the latest travel-stained envelope was nothing but a wedge of heartache. Comity tore it open. No need to ask whether her father had telegraphed news to them of Mary’s death. He had not, or Aunt Berenice would have used a black-bordered envelope.

  “Would you be good enough, Comity, to write informing Aunt Berenice…”

  “Yes, father. Of course I will.”

  “It occurs to me…” He looked at her out of the corner of his eyes. “Aunt Berenice might offer you a home with her, so that you may attend school in Adelaide and complete your education.”

  A surge of angry dismay went through Comity. Send her to live with Aunt Berenice? Was this the man who had said he and Comity could manage to run the station between them? And was he ready to pack her off to Adelaide to live with the noxious Blighs? Let him do without a deputy telegrapher or a governess to break his precious concentration. If he thought he could do without Comity too, then he could think again!

  Rise above it, kitten, said her mother’s voice inside her head.

  Rise above it as the angels do

  said her mother’s embroidery on the wall. Comity took the newly delivered book, in its torn wrappers, and ran outside to the myrtle bushes.

  But when she opened the parcel, the ants had got there ahead of her. The pages had been eaten into a lacework of holes.

  “What you doing?” Fred asked when he found her there, rocking to and fro, eyes shut, lips clamped between her teeth.

  “Rising above it,” said Comity.

  Fred was no end impressed. “How high you get up?”

  It was too hard to explain, and Comity knew she could not get through telling him without crying, which would not be rising above anything. So she offered to read him a story from the book, which was a sure way of silencing him.

  The ribbony sentences had been chopped into bits by the insects. Whole paragraphs yawned with crevasses. Dead ants peppered what was left with extra punctuation. But Comity rose above all that. Out of a title, a few nouns and some chewed verbs, she assembled a sort of story. So shutting her eyes, she invented the adventures of a poor lace-maker ordered to make dresses for twelve spoiled kangaroo princesses using only the wings of moths, the honey-bags of ants and a bucket of snow from the grate of Balmoral Castle at the other end of the world.

  Just as the Wularu of Balmoral pounced, a sharpness dug into Comity’s shoulder and, with a squeal, she found Fred’s pointy chin resting there. Hoping the gift of reading might have come to him magically overnight, he was looking to see if the lace-maker was going to survive.

  “You awake-dre
aming!” he said delightedly. “Good as any blackfellah, you awake-dreaming! I do this also! Utterly the brain go out your head and run about all over!”

  “Sometimes I do make things up,” she confessed.

  But Fred’s face was full of admiration. “Like your ma. You a stout chap with a yamble! You the whole best person round this goonawodli.”

  Not since the funeral had anyone praised Comity for anything. Kindness is very undermining. Just when you think you have risen above the tribulations sent to test you, there you are, weeping like a yarran tree.

  “Pa wants to send me away to the noxious Blighs in Adelaide and I hate them and I hate him and I am meant to love everyone but he does not love anybody at all so why do I have to?”

  Fred turned a leisurely backward somersault.

  “Is curlew-cursed, the bossman,” he said, as matter-of-fact as a doctor diagnosing measles.

  And he told her the story of Mopoke the Owl hiding in a cave and Curlew-bird jeering and sneering at him from outside, cursing him never to come out, never to see daylight again or be friends with another living creature.

  “Consequinkly, Mopoke he cry all night along – Hoo booo, hoo booo all night along. You listen.”

  Comity’s parched heart drank up every word. First she felt pity for poor Mopoke, and then the feeling spilled over and she was able to feel it for her father too, cursed with a dread of the outdoors, of open doors, of letting anyone in.

  “You mean Pa can’t help it?”

  What a relief to feel pity! What a relief to understand her father again!

  Comity resolved that she was not going anywhere, and thanks to the paper-eating ants, she knew exactly how to stay put. It would not be selfish or wicked. Her father was curlew-cursed and had to be looked after; her mother would have been the first to agree. And it was such a relief.