Corroboree (10 page)

‘Don't be tricked by what you see on the coast,' the redheaded sailor had told him sharply, as the
Asthoroth
had tacked across the green seas of the Great Australian Bight on her last leg to Port Adelaide. ‘Beyond that there coastline is nothing but desert; at least, as far as anybody's gone, and lived to tell about it. Some say the land has a great freshwater ocean, right in the middle of it, for many rivers run that way, inland. But I wouldn't trust my chances to find it. Not me, sir. Some's even gone off into the desert with boats. Boats, if you please! And they've
found the boats later on the sand-dunes, crewed by skellingtons.'

Eyre had listened, and eaten a pomegranate, and said nothing. The red-headed sailor had seemed to have a down on Australia, in any case; and had complained ever since they had left Portsmouth that Australia was the Lord's joke.

‘Why, what can you make of a land where winter is summer, and summer is winter; a land in which there are birds with wings but don't fly; and animals with heads like rabbits which bounce instead of walking; and evergreen trees which are no use at all for building, but are always crowded with birds—birds that sit still all day and laugh. Laugh! They can drive you clean mad with their laughing.'

He had often spoken, too, of the blackfellows. ‘A less Godly race of human animals there never was; bare-bum naked most of them, women too; but they paint their faces and smear themselves with ashes and grease, so you wouldn't take a fancy to any of them. They think that rocks and trees and pools of water all have souls of their own; that
places
have souls, and a sadder lot you could never meet. They sleep at night with wild dogs for blankets, when it's cold, but don't ever suppose that they're friendly. Most of them will spear you through, just like that, like a pork-chop if you give them the chance.'

The red-headed sailor had sniffed loudly, and said, ‘If you ask me, Australia was the land which the Lord used for practice, before He created the rest of the Earth; and so learned by His mistakes. Not a land to love, Australia.'

They had sailed into Port Adelaide on a cool, still, overcast afternoon. The port itself was a collection of long wharves and tall warehouses, and a few untidy stores and office-buildings. The water had been lapping up to the silty edge of the shore, cluttered with nodding beer-bottles and discarded spars and empty broken baskets. In the far distance, off to the east, barely visible through the cloud, Eyre had been able to make out the greenish-blue peaks
of the Mount Lofty range, dark with grass after the winter rains.

The red-headed sailor had watched Eyre from the quarter-deck as he disembarked; and grinned; and spat noisily into the water. Eyre had hesitated, and looked back at him; but then he had turned his face away, towards the land he would now have to call his own.

He had written to his college friend John Hardesty the Christmas before last, telling him that he was considering coming out to Australia, but of course he had left England well before any reply could have reached him, if John had replied at all. But he had an address at Angaston, and tomorrow he would hire a carter to take him out there.

He had been looking for a baggage-porter to carry his trunks for him, and to advise him where he might spend the night, when he had caught sight of his first Aborigines; two of them, standing by the unloaded luggage; and he had stopped where he was, jostled by disembarking passengers and messenger-boys and busy men in tall hats and bright waistcoats, and he had openly stared.

There had been a tall bearded man, quite upright and handsome, except that his face was smeared with grease and wilga, a thick red ochre. The man had been wearing a European jacket, but he had fastened it around himself like a cloak, and tucked up the superfluous sleeves. He had worn a loin-cloth, fastened with bone pins, and a band of stringy fur around his head. In one hand he had held a long spear. His other hand had rested on the shoulders of a young girl; small, broad-faced, and shaggy-haired, but surprisingly handsome. She had been wearing a rough cloth cloak tied up in the same way as the man's jacket, with an untrimmed hem; but to Eyre's disturbance, nothing else. One breast had been bared like a glossy black aubergine, and her curly pubic hair had been visible to all who crowded the wharf.

‘Carry your trunks, sir?' a bald old man had demanded.

‘Yes. Yes, please,' Eyre had replied, distracted.

The bald man had loaded Eyre's baggage on to a small
two-wheeled cart, drawn by a moth-eaten donkey, and had bidden Eyre to climb up on to the seat. But as they had trundled away from the
Asthoroth
, Eyre had been unable to take his eyes off the two Aborigines, standing in such a striking pose, attenuated black figures against the pearl-grey water of the harbour, half-wild, mysterious, magic, sexual; like no people that Eyre had ever seen before.

‘First time?' the old man had asked. He had boasted scarcely any teeth at all and his bald head had been as brown and wrinkled as a pickled walnut.

Eyre had nodded. The cart had bounced and rattled out of the port; and south-eastwards towards the settlement of Adelaide itself. The rough muddy road was lined with scrubby bushes; and off to the right Eyre could see rows of sand-dunes, and hear the waters of the Gulf of St Vincent slurring against the beach.

‘Got a place to kip, squire?' the old man had asked.

‘No,' Eyre had told him. It had begun to drizzle; a thin, fine, rain from the mountains.

‘Well then,' the old man had decided. ‘It's Mrs Dedham's for you. Every boy's mother, Mrs Dedham. Solid cooking, clean sheets, and Bible-reading afore bedtime.'

They had driven through the low-lying outskirts of Adelaide, the donkey slipping from time to time on the boggy road, and the rain growing steadier and heavier; until the old man took a sugar-sack, which he had ingeniously rolled up into a kind of huge beret, and tugged it on to his head. Eyre had watched the rain drip from the brim of his hat, and shivered.

They had rolled slowly past sheds, mud-huts with calico roofs and calico-covered windows and even an upturned jolly-boat, with windows cut into its sides, and a tin chimney. But then at last they had reached the wide, muddy streets of the city centre, where there were rows of plain, flat-fronted houses, and shops, and courtyards; all interspersed with groves of gum-trees and acacias; and quite handsomely laid out. Although it was a wet afternoon,
Eyre had been impressed by the number of people in the streets, and the scores of bullock-carts and carriages. He had expected the people to be roughly-dressed, but apart from a group of bearded men in tied-up trousers who were probably prospectors, most of the passers-by were smartly turned-out in tail-coats and top-hats. The women looked a little old-fashioned in their bonnets and shawls, but what they lacked in modishness they made up for in the self-assured way they promenaded along the wooden sidewalks, mistresses of a new and confident country.

Eyre had seen more Aborigines, most of them dressed in
bukas
, or native capes, but a few of them in European clothes, although one girl had been wearing an English skirt with her head and one arm through the waist, and the other arm protruding from the open placket.

Mrs Dedham had owned a fine large house at the east end of Rundle Street, built like its neighbours out of limestone, brick, and pisé. She had come bustling out to greet Eyre as if he were her prodigal son; even hugged him against her huge starched bosom; and offered him steak-and-kidney pudding at once. In the kitchen, as he had eaten with determined unhungriness, she had told him how she had come to Australia from Yorkshire with her dear husband Stanley, and how Stanley had started a sheep-farm at Teatree Gully, only to be taken at the peak of his success by ‘shrinking of the mesenteric glands', an ailment that would later be diagnosed as peritonitis. Mrs Dedham had sold off the farm and bought herself what she like to call ‘a gentleman's hotel'; three good meals a day, no visiting women, no whistling, and a communal Sunday lunch after church.

That night, in his unfamiliar bed, with an unfamiliar light shining across the ceiling, Eyre had lain awake and thought of his father. Outside in the street he had heard laughter, and a woman calling, ‘Fancy yourself, then, do you?' Then more laughter.

The following day, he had paid Mrs Dedham's
handyman four shillings to drive him out to Hope Valley, to find John Hardesty. It had still been raining as they had followed the narrow rutted track between dripping gums and wet sparkling spinifex grass; until at last they had arrived at the sheep farm, and the rain had begun to ease off.

The farm's owner had been a stocky man in a wide leather hat, his face mottled by drink and weather. He had said very little, but taken Eyre to the back of the house, and shown him the wooden-paled enclosure where John Hardesty had been buried, over two years ago.

Eyre had stood by the grave for five or ten minutes, then returned to the farmhouse. ‘Had he been ill?' he had asked.

The farmer had shrugged. ‘You could say that.'

Eyre had replaced his hat. The farmer had stared at him for a while, and then said, ‘Did away with himself. Hung himself with wire in his own barn. Nobody knows why.'

‘I see,' Eyre had said; and then, ‘Thank you for showing me.'

He had decided to stay on at Mrs Dedham's; and so that he could pay her rent of 2s 0½d the week, he had found himself a job in the tea department of M. & S. Marks' Grocery Stores, on Hindley Street, scooping out fragrant Formosas and Assams, and also brewing up tea in barrels, since some customers still preferred to buy their tea the old-fashioned way, ready infused, for warming up at home. Just after the New Year, however, he had met Christopher Willis at a party given by Marks' for all of their suppliers; and Christopher had arranged for him to take up a clerical post with the South Australian Company, for 1s 3d more per week. ‘And far more future, old man, than tea.'

His first sweetheart in Adelaide had been a saucy young Wiltshire girl called Clara, daughter of one of the aides to the Governor and Commissioner, Colonel George Gawler. Clara was green-eyed and chubbily pretty and Eyre had courted her with the frustrated enthusiasm that only a
single man living at Mrs Dedham's could have mustered. He had bought his bicycle solely to impress her, even though it had cost him two weeks' wages; and he had taken her for a wobbling ride on the handlebars from one end of King William Street to the other, with Clara shrieking and kicking her ankles.

On his return to Mrs Dedham's that evening, he had found a note waiting for him, to the effect that Clara's father had complained that Eyre had made ‘an unforgivable public exhibition of his daughter's virtue'. Mrs Dedham herself had told him the following morning, over veal pudding, that she considered it best if he sought alternative accommodation.

‘I don't expect my gentlemen to be bishops,' she said, bulging out her neck, and lacing her fingers tightly together under her bosoms. ‘But I don't expect them to be hooligans, or peculiars, either.'

That was how he had found himself staying with Mrs McConnell, on Hindley Street; and from the beginning Mrs McConnell had taken a special shine to him, and pampered him so much that in three weeks he had put on all the weight he had lost on the voyage from Portsmouth. She cooked marvellous pies, with glazed and decorated crusts, and washed his shirts and starched them until they creaked. All he had to do in return was call her ‘Mother', and accompany her once or twice a month to the Methodist chapel by Adelaide barracks. She did so like to go to chapel in company; and Dogger wouldn't go for anything. Dogger said that he had carried on quite enough conversations with the Lord in the outback; and that if he went to chapel, the Lord would only say, ‘Christ, Dogger, not you again.'

‘You have to understand that a fellow needed God, in the outback,' Dogger had frequently explained. ‘You didn't have anybody else, after all. The kowaris didn't talk to you; the dingoes didn't talk to you; and the damned skinks and shinglebacks, they'd either puff themselves up or yawn at you something terrible.'

Eyre had nodded sagely, although it was not until later
that he had learned that kowaris were desert rats, which preyed ferociously on insects and lizards and smaller rodents; and that skinks and shinglebacks were both prehistoric-looking species of lizard.

Mrs McConnell came back with the jug and the basin and the pale green jar of Keatings Salve.

‘You've not undressed,' she said.

Eyre started to unbutton his shirt. ‘I felt too sore,' he confessed. ‘And a little too tired, too.'

‘The salve will soon make you feel better.'

She tugged off his clothes in a businesslike way, until he lay naked on the bed. Then she carefully washed out his bites, and sponged the rest of his body, his chest, his back; and laid a cool wet cloth on his forehead. ‘You sometimes remind me of my son Geoffrey,' she said.

‘Yes,' Eyre acknowledged. She had told him that several times before.

‘Geoffrey always used to say that life was like a sugarbasin.'

‘Yes,' Eyre agreed.

Mrs McConnell washed the dark crucifix of hair on his chest, so that it was stuck to his skin in whorls. Quite matter-of-factly, she held his penis, and rolled back the foreskin, and washed that, too. He looked at her through puffy, half-closed eyes, and he was sure that for a second he saw something in her expression that was more than matronly; but then she smiled, and clapped her hands, and said, ‘You must have a clean nightshirt. I'll bring you one of Geoffrey's.'

He lay on the bed waiting for her. He smelled of camomile and vanilla and tincture of zinc, which seemed to be the principal ingredients of Keating's Salve. He found himself thinking of Geoffrey. Poor Geoffrey who had said that life was like a sugar-basin, because every taste of it was so sweet. Geoffrey had gone riding, a keen and straightforward young boy of eighteen; so far as Eyre could gather; and been bitten in the ankle by a death-adder, the snake the Aborigines called
tityowe
. Mrs McConnell had
stayed in her back parlour with the drapes drawn for nearly three months, until Dogger had at last come home from Broken Hill, and persuaded her to start living her own life again.