Bangalore. Roger Crook

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СКАЧАТЬ a peace, I don’t know, a glow maybe. Something happens to me…I know I am doing the most natural thing in the world and that is just being with you. Then…when we make love…we become one person…there is this fusion…that has always filled me with an ecstatic happiness…yet it frightens me with its power – it’s that power the two of us have – I can’t believe I have been so stupid to only just realise it. It’s the power we have when we are together that has made me run away; it’s been too big for me. I’ve always thought of running away as irrational, but I've been helpless in trying to fight it.

      “Having seen the way that Dad was today and when you said you thought he was lonely…that hit me between the eyes…it knocked the breath out of me. I realised, in spite of everything I am doing…I’m lonely too…and the reason you are lonely is because I’m not here with you.”

      Ali was quietly rolling a cigarette. When he’d finished he lit it with the Zippo lighter that Rachael had given to him one Christmas. He drew on it and offered it to Rachael. She took it, took a puff and handed it back. “I remember the first time we did this too – share a cigarette – it was that day when we finished mustering that last mob of stragglers – it might have been the same summer. Do you remember? It was as hot as hell and we’d been out in that breakaway country all day, big wethers that refused to move in the heat and we were into the last couple of days of shearing.”

      “We had a couple of hundred by the time we’d finished and it was getting dark so we moved them down to that goat trap so that we wouldn’t lose them again. We lit a fire and drank tea and ate everything that was in our saddle packs.” Ali handed her the cigarette again.

      “Then we lay on backs and gazed at the stars all night.”

      Rachael blew smoke in his face across the table. “Not all night, Ali,” she said in a tone pretending to mock him because he’d forgotten something.

      He looked her in the eyes and she felt herself being drawn towards him. “No, Princess, not all night. Then before dawn we moved them out and had the mob at the shearing shed by smoke-o. The cook gave us breakfast. Angus came out to see shearing finished at that shed and all he did was thank us for getting them in. If he knew we’d been out all night he didn’t say anything.”

      “He’s always known about us, hasn’t he, Ali?”

      “I’m sure he has, Rach. He never mentions it to me. He tells me when you’ve been on the phone. I tell him if you ring me. Alice asks me about you sometimes.”

      “She knows too, of course.”

      “There is nothing Alice doesn’t know; she never talks about it either. You and Ewen are her children really, but she keeps it all to herself. She’s a very private person is Alice.”

      “When we got back to Bangalore, Mother was there on one of her rare visits. I think I had said that the only reason that she was there was so that she could count the wool bales. Someone must have told her or she had deduced somehow that we had been out all night and she went ballistic. Said she was going to take me back to Perth. I remember being very cool about it. I told her that she would have to put me in chains, but if I had to stay with her at least I would meet her boyfriends. She never mentioned it again. She left for Perth the next day.”

      As they’d been reminiscing they’d found each other’s hands across the table. “Ali.”

      He lifted his eyes from their hands and looked at her. “Ali…can I come back and can we get married? I’m thirty now and I want a child with you. I don’t want this place to end with just Dad and you – two lonely men. I want to be with you, and with Dad. I want to be in this place.”

      “Of course you can, Princess.”

      “Can we get married?”

      “Of course. We’ve been man and wife since we were kids, we know that, maybe everyone else knows that. It’s just taken us a long time to get round to accepting it.”

      “That’s been my fault.”

      “I don’t want you to ever say that again. What has happened has happened. I could have followed you everywhere but I didn’t. I stayed here.”

      “And I could have come back at any time and I didn’t, except when the thoughts of you consumed me – when I needed you.”

      “That’s past now, Rach.”

      “Ali.”

      Again he looked at her. “Ali, there is something else that I want to tell you.” He waited. “There has never been another man in my life. You are the only man that I have ever made love to. There has never been anyone else. I have had boyfriends but if it ever got to where they were looking at going to bed, then I finished it. I always thought of you and I couldn’t – I don’t know – defile myself with another man.”

      He just sat there looking at her. She began to feel a little nervous. Then he smiled at her. “We are a couple of bloody fools, you and me, Princess. Here we are thirty years of age. We’ve been lovers since we were sixteen and neither of us has had another lover in all that time. It’s unbelievable.”

      “You too?”

      “Never saw the need. If I saw a pretty girl or a good-looking woman, especially if they came on to me, then I’d just think of you and have another beer.”

      “That’s almost monastic.”

      “Not really. Old Walter taught me years ago how to sit quietly under a tree and how you can go to other places. The modern term is meditation I suppose. Walter and I used to camp out for days on end fencing and that sort of thing. He taught me a lot about his ways, blackfella ways. When he first told me that he knew what was going on with his family back in Meekatharra I didn’t believe him until one day he started packing up and saying that he had to go to town. I brought him back to Bangalore. He jumped into his old Ute and was gone. Your dad rang the sergeant in town and told him Walter was on his way and his family were a bad lot and asked him to keep an eye on Walter. The sergeant told him that less than an hour before Angus had rung, Walter’s brother had been in a fight and was badly injured and they’d sent for the Flying Doctor.”

      “Are you saying that you knew what I was up to when I was away?”

      He laughed and stood up. “Not at all, Princess, like I said half an hour ago, I could come to this place, or be anywhere else and think of this place for a few minutes and find peace; in a strange sort of way I could be with you. Let’s go and have a swim and then we have to decide how we are going to tell everyone.”

      They swam, both content with an inner comfort and soothing awareness that their time together now stretched to the far horizon and beyond. Their mistakes of the past, if they had been mistakes, were gone.

      They held hands as they walked out of the water. At the water’s edge Rachael stopped and turned and faced him. Her bare breasts touched his chest. She took his face in her hands and kissed him. “I love you, Ali Barber.”

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