Back of Sunset. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ hill, its buildings marked in the glare only by the pock-mark of their shadows: sunlight flashed on a window but the flash was hardly remarkable in the bright intense light.

      “That’s it,” said the shearer sitting next to Stephen. “The arse-end of Australia. Maybe of the world, I dunno. I wouldn’t wanna look for worse than this.’’

      “Why do you come up here?” Stephen’s ears cracked as the plane went steeply down.

      “The money’s good. What have you come up for?”

      A holiday: Stephen looked out at the vast bare land and knew the answer would be ridiculous. “I’m on a research trip. I’m a doctor.”

      “Thought a doc would have found enough to do down in the city.” The shearer loosened his seat belt as the plane touched down and swung round to taxi back along the strip. He looked out with a sour eye as the boab tree, its arms lifted in obscene gestures, went by the window. “Bloke wants his head read, coming up here. But it’s the money. It’s always the money.”

      Stephen loosened his seat belt and stretched. It had been a long journey already, yet he knew he was really only at the beginning of it. The long flight from Sydney to Darwin in the Britannia: the business men going to London, their brashness increasing as they got farther from home, nobody in London or Hamburg or Rome was going to scare them, let me tell you; the girl singer on her way to Singapore, her speaking voice a thin pain in the ear; the missionary and his wife, their hands clasped together, their free hands clutching small Bibles, depending on God and each other for support in the wilderness that lay ahead of them. The trip down from Darwin in the old Douglas: the pearling captain who reeked of drink, six weeks of it; the meat-workers, washed and scrubbed, who somehow still seemed to reek of blood; the two aboriginal stockmen, used to buck-jumpers and wild cattle, wide-eyed with fright as the plane rode smoothly through the blazing sky. And the shearer, who came up here only for the money.

      “Be seeing you, doc; enjoy yourself – although I doubt it. It’s a bastard of a country.”

      He went down the aisle of the plane and Stephen followed him. The hostess smiled at him, wishing him luck; and he stepped out of the plane into the glare and a thick miasma of flies. He smote at the flies with one hand while Jack Tristram grabbed the other.

      “Welcome, son. Stone the crows, you know, I wondered if you’d really come, know what I mean? Welcome back, Steve.”

      Welcome back: Stephen hadn’t thought of his coming up here in terms of a return. But it was, of course. He had spent only six months here and he had been only seven years old at the time; he could remember little of the time or the place, but there was no denying his arrival here now was a return.

      Tristram continued to talk as he led Stephen across the dusty strip towards a parked utility truck. Behind the truck there was a rusted galvanised-iron hangar: a small plane stood within its gloom, a bird that knew enough to come in out of the sun. A blaze of white parrakeets swung down with a loud screech and settled in the boab tree beside the shed. Three aboriginal children stood thin-legged, like cranes, in the black pools of their own shadow; an old gin, her face dark and lined as an empty water-bag, sat with her back against the post of a faded sign that proclaimed: Winnemincka Airport. The flies thickened, as if they recognised a newcomer who had not been tasted, and Stephen smote at them continuously and with increasing temper.

      “This is Kate Brannigan,” Tristram was saying, taking Stephen’s bag from him and swinging it into the back of the truck. “And this is the Flying Doc, Phil Covici. This is Steve McCabe. You’ve heard me talk of his old man.”

      Because of the glare and the flies Stephen had not noticed the man and girl standing beside the truck. Covici was in his fifties, black-haired, fat, jovial, unkempt: his buttonless shirt was open to his waist, his shorts were held up by an old tie, bare horny feet were encased in old sandals: only the purpose-fulness in the dark merry face stopped you from writing him off as just another beachcomber. He had an organ roll of a laugh that would be no help to him as a doctor: it would only broadcast how healthy he himself was. He thrust out a hand in which a meat chopper would have looked more at home than a scalpel.

      “G’day, Steve. Glad to have you here. Hope I can show you enough to make your trip worthwhile.”

      Stephen looked at him, puzzled; but the girl had stepped forward and he turned to her. She was dressed in a man’s khaki shirt and trousers; beside Covici she looked as neat as a page boy. She had high wide cheekbones, a firm straight nose and a full-lipped mouth; her face was too strong for real beauty, but it was a face that would always attract a stranger’s gaze. Only the eyes softened it: they were dark, heavy-lidded and with the longest lashes Stephen had ever seen. They were a woman’s eyes, for coquetry or the mirroring of passion; but now they appeared almost hostile. Her handclasp was firm but not encouraging.

      “I’m the base radio operator,” Kate Brannigan said, and Stephen felt he was expected to know more than she had just told him. She looked at the brown linen suit and the white panama he wore; his suede shoes could have been cloven hoofs the way she looked at them. She opened the door of the truck. “You’d better ride in the front with Doc and me. We can’t get you dirtied so soon after getting off the plane.”

      There was no contempt in her voice: it was too well-trained, had read too many private telegrams over the radio: it was impersonal as a news reader’s. But there was no mistaking the look in the eyes: they would never be able to disguise what the girl thought. Stephen turned away from her and clambered into the back of the truck beside Tristram.

      “I want to talk to Jack. Don’t worry about my getting dirty.”

      Kate drove as if she had never been troubled by traffic nor traffic lights. The truck bumped along the rutted road at fifty miles an hour; it sucked in dust behind it in a thick red cloud. Stephen sat on his bag, clutching at the sides of the truck with both hands; the flies had fled as soon as the dust had begun to swirl in.

      “What’s the matter with her?” Stephen had to shout above the noise of the truck. “What’s she got against me?”

      “She’ll be all right!” Tristram had taken his teeth out as soon as they got into the back of the truck; his lips and gums were rimmed with a red paste of spittle and dust. “She’s always like that with strangers from down south!”

      “What about Covici? He sounded as if he was expecting me!”

      The truck lurched and Tristram sprawled against Stephen. “I told ’em you were coming up here to look at the Flying Doctor set-up! What else did you come for?”

      Stephen, already stiff and sore, his mouth full of dust, said nothing. He had gone out to the airport at Mascot a week ago to farewell Tristram and had then told him he would be coming to Winnemincka. There in the noisy bustling waiting-room it had somehow been difficult to tell Tristram he would be coming north only as a form of retreat, to escape from the surroundings that had begun to fit him too tightly, like a weil-worn suit that had all at once become a straitjacket; he was not even making a sentimental journey, because he was too matter-of-fact to feel sentiment about a place he could barely remember. He had just told Tristram he would be coming, and left it at that. And Tristram, still seeing in him the faint ghost of Tom McCabe, had made his own conclusion.

      Then they were coming into Winnemincka. Mangrove swamps stretched out a mile or more to the copper-tinged slash of the sea: a memory came back to Stephen, something he had read at school or perhaps his father had told him, of a forty-foot tide on this part of the north-west coast. Behind the town the flat-topped mountain rose steeply like a giant red anvil; СКАЧАТЬ