Riders in the Chariot (53 page)

"It's only sociable," she said, when he arrived still in doubt. "You get lonely shut up in the home. I'm in the empty-bottle business," she explained. "I ride around most days in the sulky, all around the town, and pick up bottles, and other things besides, and yarn to people, but the pony's gone an' staked 'isself. God knows 'ow long I'm gunna be mucked up."

The woman must have been white once, but the sun and her pursuits had cured her, until she now presented the colour and texture of mature bacon. She was thin enough, but might have plumped out with teeth. Inside the cotton dress, her breasts suggested small, but active animals. Trying to jump at you, it appeared at times. She had those old blue eyes which bring back cold, windy days, and not even a crow in the sky. That was not to say she did not see a great deal; she would have identified what was stowed away under the seat of a stranger's sulky, even if the object had been wrapped in several bags.

"Where you from?" she asked Alf.

He named a town of which he had heard, in a far corner of the state.

"You a quarter-caste?" she asked.

"No," he said. "Half. I think."

"You could get into trouble," she said, almost eagerly.

Then she asked him his age, and about his mum. She showed him that expression which some women put on at mention of a mother. She showed him her rather watery gums.

"You're a big boy," she said. "For your age."

She told him her name was Mrs Spice, but that he might call her Hazel if he liked.

He did not like. At all times during their short association, a kind of fastidiousness prevented him using her first name, though there was much else that he accepted.

An association, he now realized with some horror, was forming on the edge of the rubbish dump between himself and Mrs Spice. Of course he could always run away, but had to be released by some mechanism which circumstance must first set off. The agitation he experienced at such an uncertain prospect transferred itself through his fingers to the old clock he was carrying, which started a gentle tinkling and jingling of shaken metal.

"What's that you got?" asked Mrs Spice, only to make conversation like, because of course she saw.

"A clock," he said. "Or bits of it."

"Golly!" She laughed. "That won't do no one any good. You can't eat the guts of a bloody clock."

Again he realized that fate was in action. The locked mechanism of his will was allowing Mrs Spice to lead him through the hole of her humpy into a darkness in which she lived. He was at least comforted by the jingling of his little clock.

"A bite to eat is what a growin' boy like you needs before any think else, " the lady said.

And unwrapped something. It was cold, fatty, and tasted rancid. But he ate it, together with some ant-infested bread, because he was hungry, and because it saved him from the possibility of having to do anything else, particularly talk.

Mrs Spice, he soon gathered, was one of those people who do not eat. She rolled herself a cigarette, and poured out a draught into a mug, which made her suck her lips in, right back over the gums, and then blow them out again. The contents of the mug were that strong she was almost sucked into it.

How long Alf Dubbo remained camped with Mrs Spice he often wondered. She fed him as much as she thought necessary. He helped her water the pony and sort the bottles. But would not join her on her sulky-rides around the town. He was happiest when he could escape and moon around the rubbish dump, where, it seemed, the inhabitants of Mungindribble had shed their true selves, and he was always making discoveries which corroborated certain suspicions he already had of men. Sometimes he would lie on an old mattress, where its overflow of springs and stuffing allowed, and dream the paintings which circumstances prevented him temporarily from doing. He was painting all the time. Except in paint, of course. In these new pictures which his mind created, the bodies of men were of old springs and rubber, equally, with the hair bursting out of them, and sometimes a rusty rabbit-trap for jaws. He would paint the souls inside the bodies, because Mr Calderon had told him all about the souls. Often he would paint them in the shape of unopened tins--of soup, or asparagus, or some such--but pretty battered, and the contents all fermented, waiting to burst out in answer to a nail. He would snooze and compose. The old, broken-down clock, with the altar lights jingling and tinkling inside it, was very reminiscent of his former guardian. Motion still eluded him, though; he could apprehend it, but knew that he would not have been able to convey it. And sometimes the souls, which were the most interesting and obsessive part of his paintings, should have leapt up in the bodies, like the wind of metho, or the delirious throb and dribble of love.

For, soon after his arrival, Mrs Spice had introduced him to the rest of his duties. She had uncorked the bottle one night, and said, "I am running short, Alf"--she always was--"but will give you a drop to pick you up, and show I am a good sport. You are a big boy now, you know. You are thin. But that don't matter."

He did not know that he wanted the drink, but took it because it might lead him on to fresh discovery. He made her laugh. Himself too, eventually. It was like the time, he remembered, when Mrs Pask had tinkered with the switch. It was as if he had drunk down a real electric shock; it just about shot him back against the wall.

He stayed shaky for a little. He felt his skin had gone blue. But Mrs Spice did not seem to notice. She would have mentioned it if, all of a sudden, she had seen him turn blue, because she mentioned almost everything.

"That will grow the hair on yers!" She laughed, that was all, rousing herself so that her tits jumped, and the hurricane lamp.

Then she got serious, and, after pouring them another, reaching over with her leathery, but quite smooth and nice arm, would have liked to talk about things.

"Sometimes I wonder what you think about, Alf," she said. "What is inside of you. Everyone has somethink in them, I suppose."

Then she blinked, because she had made a serious contribution, like as if she was in the habit of reading books.

Alf could not tell her. Because he could not have simply said: Everything is inside of me, waiting for me to understand it. Mrs Spice would not have understood. Any more than he did, altogether, except in flickers. So he had another drink out of the mug. One day he would paint the Fiery Furnace, with the figures walking in it. He could see them quite distinct now.

All the time Mrs Spice was trying to impress. He saw at first faintly, then with cruel bursts of understanding. Her words and gestures were those of some other woman, who already existed in her imagination, and who would at last, with the cooperation of her audience and the bottle, perhaps even exist in fact.

"You gotta realize I was not always like this, " she was saying, holding together her straight and loose hair, with both hands, at the nape of her neck.

Although she succeeded surprisingly in her aim--there she was, a young woman in a cleaner cotton dress, smoother, smelling of laundry above the strong armpits--he knew the act to be dishonest. Had he not on one occasion promised Mrs Pask to paint the picture of Jesus Christ because he wanted something awful bad? And had known himself to be incapable.

At least Mrs Spice was capable of fulfilling promises.

"Nobody never accused me of sittin' on it," she said. "Mean is what I am not."

"You don't wanta be afraid," she added, when she had crawled over to his side of the shack.

He was not afraid, only surprised at the powers which had been given him.

"And remember," she shouted, "I am not some bloody black gin! I am NOT--"

She shut up then, as they became possessed of the same daemon.

During the night she was alternately limp and quarrelsome, until he at last shrank back into the body of a thin and sulky boy.

"Go on!" he called out finally. "Get to hell!"

He might have rolled himself into a ball, in self-protection, but he was pretty sure she would have picked it open.

So he began to hit the old bag.

"I'll fetch the Johns in the mornin'!" she shrieked. "Layin' into a white woman!"

When she fell asleep. He could hear the breath whistling out of her slack mouth.

Towards dawn, Alf Dubbo crawled out of Mrs Spice's hut. He was wearing his skin, which was all she had left him, but it felt good. It was the pearly hour. Damp blankets fell in folds upon his bare shoulders. He wandered a little way along the bank of the almost dry river. Dim trees disputed with him for possession of the silence, as twig or drop fell, and his hard feet scuffed up the dead leaves. The formlessness of the scene united with the aimlessness of his movements in achieving a kind of negative perfection.

But he could not leave well alone. He had to start mucking around with the smooth bark of one tree and then another, with a nail he had picked up in leaving the camp. The faint line of his longing began to flow out of him and over the white bark of the trees. He drew languorously sometimes, sometimes almost inflicting wounds. And would move on to express some fresh idea. And never finished, and would never, so hopeless and interminable were the circumstances in which, continually, he found himself fixed.

After a bit he began to go back in the direction of the camp. There was nothing else he could do for the moment. Colour was returning to the sky. Out in the open the light was sharpening its edge on tins.

Mrs Spice appeared, giggly and abusive, after rising ladylike and late.

"You're a fair trimmer!" she repeated several times, and tittered. "But don't think you're goin' to rule the roost," she hastened to add, "just because, I was good to yers once. Generosity has its limits."

After which she drew in her chin.

But she could not keep it there for long.

She had acquired a numerous clientele, through her dealings in bottles, as well as by bush telegraph. It was not uncommon for shearers in town on a spree to look up Hazel, or for a drover on the road to hitch his sulky to her tree. Gentlemen would drive out from town, or even walk late at night, arriving with a clink of bottles and a salvo of ribaldry. It must be said she seldom disappointed. Or if she did, it was usually some timid soul who had suddenly thought better of it. And for such there were always the alternatives of conversation and song. Mrs Spice herself was musical, and, when squeezed in a certain way, would let out a thin soprano in imitation of an oriental bagpipe. There were nights when the moon reverberated with entertainments at the rubbish dump.

Alf Dubbo preferred to keep out of all that, suspecting how he would be treated--like an idiot, or a black--but sometimes could not avoid being caught, early and innocently asleep, in Mrs Spice's shack.

On one such occasion a shearer from Cowra, particularly leery, and beery, and proud of his easy conquest of a lady, noticed something in the corner, and remarked, "What-o, Hazel! Takin' a swig at the black-jack on the side?"

But Mrs Spice, when stood up, could demonstrate that coarseness was never the master of delicacy.

"That," she replied, "I would have you know, Mr Er, is a young boy apprenticed to the bottle trade."

In between casual custom and the normal business round, she forgot she had warned the abo not to expect anything further of a lady's generosity, and would become fretfully solicitous. Sometimes he laughed in her face, sometimes he beat her with a little switch, but at others they rode together on the tiger, until that slashed and fiery beast turned into an empty skin.

At last, apathy and some foreboding descended on Alf Dubbo. He would look at himself, puzzled and frightened. He was feeling off, the distance through the doorway glittering with tins and emptiness.

"'Ere," she asked, "what's got inter youse?"

"I feel crook," he said, and turned.

Then she would swear, and shake the bags on which she slept.

She grew more cantankerous.

"You are not worth your damper," she said once. "Layin' around!"

And spat.

A couple of days later she came up to him in the sun. He could see that her thoughts were already spilling out of her. She said, "You
are
_ crook! And waddaya done ter me? Eh? A fine present ter give!"

He realized how they hated each other.

"You old rubbish dump!" he cried. "Who's to know who dropped it on yer? What with drovers, and shearers, and everybody!"

She was cursing, and shaking.

"Those are the last words you say in my place!" she shouted.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, Mrs Spice."

He took his shoes and went, although it was already four o'clock in the afternoon. He slept under a tree that night, and woke early, to re-examine the mark of his sickness the first moment possible. Then he sat, during the brief space when the sun deceives with gold. And continued sitting as the world stretched before him in its actual colours, of grey-brown.

Alf Dubbo now went bush, figuratively at least, and as far as other human beings were concerned. Never communicative, he retired into the scrub of half-thoughts, amongst the cruel rocks of obsession. Later he learned to prefer the city, that most savage and impenetrable terrain, for the opportunities it gave him of confusing anyone who might attempt to track him down in his personal hinterland. But for the time being, he hung around country towns, and stations, working for a wage, or earning his keep, sometimes even living on a charitable person for a week or two. He never cared to stay anywhere long. There was always the possibility that he might be collected for some crime he began to suspect he had committed, or confined to a reserve, or shut up at a mission, to satisfy the social conscience, or to ensure the salvation of souls that were in the running for it.

He avoided his own people, whatever the degree of colour, because of a certain delicacy with cutlery, acquired from the parson's sister, together with a general niceness or squeamish-ness of behaviour, which he could sink recklessly enough when forced, as he had throughout the reign of Mrs Spice, but which haunted him in its absence like some indefinable misery.