Best Australian Short Stories (14 page)

Since John Gray had married, and there was a woman at Murndoo, she found plenty of washing, scrubbing, and sweeping for the gins to do: would not spare them often to go after cattle. But John was short-handed. He had said he must have Rose and Minni to muster Nyedee. And all day her baby’s crying had irritated Rose. The cooboo had wailed and wailed as she rode with him tied to her body.

The cooboo was responsible for the wrong things she had done all day. Stupid things. Rose was furious. The men had yelled at her. Wongana, her man, blackguarding her before everybody, had called her “a hen who did not know where she laid her eggs”. And John Gray, with his “You damn fool, Rosey. Finish!” had sent her home like a naughty child.

Now there was Minni jabbering of the tobacco she would get and the new gina-gina. How pleased Wongana would be with her! And the cooboo, wailing, wailing. He wailed as he chewed Rose’s empty breast, squirming against her: wailed and gnawed.

She cried out with hurt and impatience. Rage, irritated to madness, rushed like waters coming down the dry creek-beds after heavy rain. Rose wrenched the cooboo from her breast and flung him from her to the ground. There was a crack as of twigs breaking.

Minni glanced aside. “Wiah!” she gasped, with widening eyes. But Rose rode on, gazing ahead over the rosy, garish plains and the wall of the hills, darkening from blue to purple and indigo.

When the women came into the station kitchen, earth, hills, and trees were dark: the sky heavy with stars. Minni gave John’s wife his message: that he would be home with the new moon, in about a fortnight.

Meetchie, as the blacks called Mrs John Gray, could not make out why the gins were so stiff and quiet; why Rose stalked, scowling and sulky-fellow, sombre eyes just meeting hers, and moving away again. Meetchie wanted to ask about the muster: what sort of condition the bullocks had been in; how many were on the road; if many calves had been branded at Nyedee. But she knew the women too well to ask questions when they looked like that.

Only when she had given them bread and a tin of jam, cut off hunks of corned beef for them, filled, their billies with strong black tea, put sugar in their empty tins, and the gins were going off to the uloo, she realized that Rose was not carrying her baby as usual.

“Why, Rose,” she exclaimed, “where’s the cooboo?”

Rose walked off into the night. Minni glanced back with scared eyes and followed Rose.

In the dawn, when a cry, remote and anguished, flew through the clear air, Meetchie wondered who was dead in the camp by the creek. She remembered how Rose had looked the night before when she asked about the cooboo.

Now, she knew the cooboo had died; Rose was wailing for him in the dawn, cutting herself with stones until her body bled, and screaming in the fury of her grief.

FROM the Investigator of Occurrences and Conduct Peculiar or Unusual, Dept X, to the Inspector of Nuisances, Tanglehurst:

Dear Sir,

I enclose herewith copy of report from an observer in an aero plane, on a reconnaissance flight over your terrain, received by me yesterday:

“While flying in a northerly direction over Tanglehurst on the 18th inst., at an altitude of 1000 feet, the visibility being excellent, we sighted at eleven a.m. Eastern Standard Time what appeared to be a raft floating in a sea of greenery. As washing was hanging on the rigging we concluded that the raft had an occupant. The absence of distress signals indicated, we assumed, that all was well on board.”

Please forward explanation of this extraordinary discovery at your earliest convenience.

While walking the other morning along a path deep down on the bottom, as it were, of the sea of greenery, I met the owner and occupant of the “raft”. He crawled ashore, as perhaps it would be permissible to say, through a tunnel under the expanse of green. Wearing boots and what resembled overalls of the same colour, he looked more like a large grasshopper than anything else.

We are neighbours,” he said “I have been observing you for some little time. I often see you when you don’t see me. In fact you have never, in all probability, seen me before.”

“Oh yes I have,” I replied. “But only once. I caught sight of you whilst up a tree breaking some dead branches off for fire-wood. You were sitting on what appeared to be a spring-mattress, double-bed size, resting on top of all that tangle and riot of creepers. If I were not mistaken you were mending a pair of trousers.”

“There must at the time have been a very high tide then,” he growled sourly, “for, as the Inspector of Nuisances who has been round here day after day again lately, peering in every direction through field-glasses, has, I should think, discovered, I’m very hard to find.”

“A very high tide?” I said, in wonderment.

“Yes,” he said. “This sea of greenery rises at times, and at others falls. The moon even when in perigee has nothing at all to do with it; the weather, though, everything. After rain always it rises. Heat, especially if prolonged and unrelieved, causes it to sag, so much so that every now and then I find myself nearing the ground.”

“What put the idea into your head, in the first place, if you wouldn’t mind me asking? Was it the housing shortage?”

“Well, no,” said the vine-dweller, “it wasn’t. When I first came here to live—I don’t own the allotment, thank goodness—I began the way most people begin when they occupy a block or tract of ground covered thickly, as this one is, with a tangle of undergrowth both riotous and exuberant: I started with a brushhook and a sickle to slash and hack it down—my idea, which I must admit was most ordinary and mundane, being to plant vegetables when all the wild verdure had been slain. Yes, I was utterly ruthless. I attacked it with fury, slaughtered it as though it were poisonous or had endeavoured to injure me. But I had not been doing so long, I’m pleased to say, before I began to question the rectitude of such savagery. Was it patriotic? I asked myself, for, after all, these creepers are indigenous and have been here for generations, which surely gives them more right to occupy and even to monopolize the soil than the French, Lima, and Madagascar beans, the Brussels sprouts, the Jerusalem artichokes, the Lebanon lettuces, the Swede tumips—and other vegetables with an origin that is alien®I had thought of planting. Even weeds, many of them— Scotch thistles for instance, buttercups, clover, hawthorne, gorse and blackberry, just to mention a few—having found their way into this country from other lands, are far less entitled to right of occupancy than the intertwined, ever-thickening festoons and masses of sub-tropical vegetation I was intent upon destroying. So I desisted,” he said, “which, as I cannot claim to be by any means energetic, really, could scarcely be regarded as a deprivation.

“How, then, without exterminating any more of these robust and splendid vines,” he continued, “was I to erect a habitation of some kind? Why erect one at all? Why incur the fatigue? Why not, I asked myself after cogitation, let the creepers sustain you? They’re thick and strong enough. Live then in suspension among them; float in perpetuity on this deep, green heaveless sea.

“But to derive the greatest benefit from the project and, at the same time minimize the possibility of interference, it would be most necessary, I realized—as, of course, the other inhabitants of all such wildernesses do—to merge to the uttermost into one’s environment, to match it or harmonize so closely with it that, save to the practised eye, one would be invisible.

It can of course, be done quite easily,” he added. All that one needs is a pot of paint of the colour of one’s surroundings, and clothing of the selfsame hue.”

“By the way,” I said, “is your floating home, as I surmised, a spring-mattress, double-bed size?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I could think of nothing more suitable. It has, in fact, satisfied me so completely that I have sent the maker, whose name is on it, a testimonial in which I stated that it is unequalled for the purpose.

“The tarpaulin I use in wet weather,” he went on, “is, I need scarcely mention, painted the same shade of green as the mattress. My overalls, boots, hat, and socks, as no doubt you have noticed, are of locust colour too.”

“What about insects?” I asked. “Aren’t they a nuisance to you?” “No,” he said, “they don’t trouble me in the least. I have tamed several that are formidable, you see. They never leave me, are very watchful, and hurl all other insects that reach the mattress—either out of idle curiosity or with the intention of molesting me—off it at once. If they don’t like these intruders much they maim or kill them as a rule before doing so,” he added.

“But what do you live on ?” I asked.

“Fish, birds’ eggs, fledgelings, berries—wild ones that are edible can be gathered by the hatful about here, in the autumn especially —certain weeds for salad purposes, and snails, which are delicious and nearly always plentiful.”

“You mentioned fish just now, of which I myself am fond,” I said. “Is there then a river or creek about here?”

“No,” he replied, “but under the greenery—only some few of my feathered friends and I know exactly where it is to be found—there is a deep pool fed by a spring. Even in the hottest weather it is cool, and there are fish and eels in it, as yet unsophisticated and therefore easily caught.”

“You know,” I said, “I have often heard at night sounds in the greenery that are extraordinary, sounds that I cannot bring myself to believe are made by birds, animals, or insects of any kind, sounds that are almost yet not quite human, and most eerie. At first I used to think I only dreamt I heard them, and then, lying awake, when all was still, I would hear them again. I may merely be imaginative, but I can’t help thinking—”

“No! No! Please don’t tell me! I’d rather you didn’t!” he exclaimed, turning a little pale, I thought, and with a tremor in his voice. “I know,” he murmured hurriedly, and seeming uneasy, “but must refrain from saying anything at all about them.”

From the Inspector of Nuisances, Tanglehurst, to the Investigator of Occurrences and Conduct Peculiar or Unusual, Dept X:

Dear Sir,

In reply to yours of the 24th ultimo, I beg to inform you that I subjected the surface of the sea of greenery, mentioned by observer in aeroplane, to the closest scrutiny for several weeks, but could find no trace of a raft or anything resembling one. I have therefore come to the conclusion that the raft, if there was one, has foundered.

THE night was hot and still. Nocturnal insects of all kinds, stealthy, predatory, filled with tremendous activity, endeavoured to avoid, circumvent, or to capture one another on the walls and the ceiling, the window-curtains and the floor. And I was one among them, there along with them, alert, quick-eyed, full of cunning, strangely strong, observant, voracious and filled with hideous bliss.

I was very wide awake indeed as I wormed my way, with several other fleas, upward through the horsehair mattress upon which reposed the warmth-radiating body known as mine.

My companions, I noticed, were as big as black knights in a very large chess-set, as trimly made too, and just as shiny. Not in the least surprised to find that I was a man no longer, but had become a flea, I was, nevertheless, somewhat astonished that my recumbent human presentiment could go on breathing calmly while I, the entity so lately inhabiting it, but now escased in gleaming black flea-armour, looked on luxuriating in its warmth. I had never noticed before that humans were so irresistibly appetizing. Nor had I even seen any animal so huge as this one was. Gigantic. Yes, most truly. Standing on tip hind-toes, near its right hand, which, with fingers outstretched, loomed above me, massive as the roots of a very old tree, I looked higher still and almost with awe at the smooth continent of gently-heaving flesh.

I was never so intensely interested in anything in all my life. Immense buildings, lofty mountains, colossal icebergs, enormous rocks and trees the many sights and adventures of foreign travel, nothing in the world could possibly enthral me as did this remarkably warm, softly-moulded, living and breathing continent.