Shearers' Motel (16 page)

This was bad. The worst. Up at Wilga shed it was impossible to enter or even approach the doorway without repulsion.

Dead meat with wool attached shone in the sun. Kites spiralled in the heat given out by galvanised iron. Blood blackened a concrete slab. There was offal in places. Green flies, blowflies, bush flies, maggots, meat ants, goannas on the move and crows thrashing around. There was always more death than could be rotted or taken away, more legs with wool on, more eyeballs in skulls, more carcases on the dump, in the paddocks, more stark ribcages and yellowing pelvises around the watering points. The pile-up of carcases exceeded any capacity on the part of scavengers to effect their removal.

In the holding yards torpedo-shaped turds wallowed in a dust of fibres and shit-pellets and urinous burrs. There was a smell like body gas — a released sigh of disgust. He stood back with a forearm across his face. The shed was alive to the processes of death. A man's body was found under here last year, a man the station children saw under the floorboards, in the shade. The last sundowner.

He kept thinking of him — a man like a dead sheep, a
traveller who had walked in from the road and found haven under the slats of a reeking shelter. When he entered the foulness of the shed he entered the last house, the ruin of home that had drawn him in at the end of his journey, offering an image of safety. Stink was his comfort and tufts of dags registered his last breath in the stillness.

More shit on the steps going up, stamped, jagged on, with more wool attached like Mohawk scalps, making the steps dangerous to walk on.

Inside the shed a breeze shuddered the loose iron walls. Here the wandering man was alive after his death, occupying the shadows where skins hung in rows on the catching pens. Hunched down in the sorting bins were serrated and grey fleeces of dead wool composing a fat back, a puffy face, spindly legs. Here was the dwelling place of repletion after capture and possession. Here was the house of a man feasted through to completion and starved to necessity. Here he came alive to himself in contradiction, breasting a death, enacting a prayer for continuation: was this who he was?

He put an eye to the slatted floorboards and looked down as the children had looked down. They had seen only a dead sheep, said their father. Their mother told them it was all imagination. They were never allowed to say it clearly, even when the police Landcruiser drove away with a flyblown lump in a body bag.

He could say it. Entering the shed he entered the house that was underneath the first house he ever knew. It was the house that was always coming into being, the house discovered after long mystification, long after the literal house of childhood was demolished and became a motel, and the yard tree with its stairway to the stars chain-sawed for firewood. Passion and neglect, drunkenness and euphoria were the raucous replacements for childhood's warmth and the soft blaze of family love here. Gone was the voice that told him he could never be what he understood himself to be, that said what he felt was nothing, not worth understanding. At some time or other he had come along the road to the dead man's shed and
crawled under the slatted floorboards and lain there.

He kept going deeper in. Orange peel and sandwich crusts gone hard as crockery were there. Piles of sliced bread bags were held down by a counterweight. Shreds of dirty towelling, cracked soap, a rusty handbasin. Strange filthy environment it was. Fly oil bit into his lungs. In the engine room was the nausea of diesel, with everything contained in four-litre plastic containers with the tops ripped off: improvised, temporary, made-do. Shit here too, shit where shit should never be, this being the far end of the animal universe, where machines were made to do away with shit but didn't. Pelleted, shot-splattered, rolled, kicked, grey plasticine-trodden-in shit, delivered by a trembly-legged half-squatting shitting sheep that got away, he guessed, while men chased it — shit flung everywhere with blood flicked around for good measure, a mild sheep fallen down into this engine well become a wild sheep, knocking and trembling, caught against hot metal, eyes on fire. Murder and mayhem concentrated into an essence of oil slime, shit slime, grease slime. The cocky here could not go half an hour without a drink, he'd start shaking. He'd be down at the shed half an hour watching the shearing with his dog, and then he'd start to get the shakes and he'd be back up at the homestead.

Up the next steps in a strange light. Louvres of green glass for some reason. Men and women would soon start work here, hangover-sour, the reek of entrapment in work-life going right up into the brain, into the emotions, into the prejudices. There was only one cure for stink, headache, depression, rage, and that was elation. Roar the scorn. Stride, reach, haul, hold. Fuck it if you felt like it and maim. To the cocky: ‘Get your fucking dog outa here or I'll slice the count in two'.

Work began. Enthusiasm cold on the hottest of days. Everything starting again, beginning over in the foul stink-pen of Wilga shed where the scum of an animal was left behind and accorded no value, its shreds of bleeding skin and tufts of wispy nothing hair, its rapid-fire terrified shits and staggery piss-floods blown away by a bellow.

It was not a happy time up there in the most desolate corner of the State. There were too many sheep on Wilga and they turned it into a desert in a good season. ‘I could tell you tales, really, I was appalled, absolutely appalled,' said an English woman he met who had worked in the kitchen the previous year, but had shot through, going to work in the roadhouse fifty kilometres to the east. ‘My observations were such that I felt, you know, this is crazy, this is absolutely crazy. The world has passed them by up here.

‘Honestly, I prefer sheep to some people, the way they are.'

 

Sheep looked at him dolefully from the yards beside the Wilga shed, where they were brought in during the day for the next day's shearing. They were creatures with no reason to like him, or anyone else for that matter. Their mistrust was all-inclusive. They knew that at any moment the sky would fall in, and when it did, whose fault would it be? If they were human someone would ask what the problem was, but because they were sheep the problem was them.

Dust choked them and they sneezed and coughed and made more dust with their trotting hooves. It was a fine dust composed of dried crystals of urine and shredded sheepshit and sand. Mixed in was a variety of spilled chemicals, jetting mixes and dips, bituminous and milky substances from old bottles, from the nozzles of plastic knapsack dispensers, and from rusted, leaking containers dropped under floorboards.

All it took was a noseful of this pungent sheep-dust to rouse the feeling of dreary confrontation that characterised Wilga. It was the smell greeting new arrivals at the station gate, where sheep always gathered, mobbing up to an exit (as long as they weren't made to). Workers who'd been away for a while spat and wrenched the flimsy gate-hinges back: ‘Fuckin' sheep again'.

Sheep packed into a corner and squashed each other. They stayed dead-still for a moment, then broke without warning, slamming against a far fence, bodies wedged hard, lungs straining, heads jammed up stiffly. Panic was in the air. Resentment. A crow-cry punctuated the moment.

It was all overstated. Melodramatic. It couldn't last. Sheep couldn't be convincing about one passion before replacing it with another. Some of them began staring at the ground as if it were grass. They made the watcher into an illusion too.

Then they went hard at it again, in their eternal scrum. They were locked into mob rule. Soon there would be an event involving mass numbers of sheep being inspired by other sheep to move farther and farther back until, at the last moment, when all seemed lost, a way of escape would miraculously appear. A mass exodus against the imprecations of men and dogs would occur. And it would be a phenomenon in their lives. It would be something new, something never before encountered: a way through, a release — a gate, a race, a ramp. Sheep lived in a hell of short-term memory loss. Tremendous relief would be expressed in a thundering and rattling of wooden planks, and they would pour upwards into the silvery light of the
shed, possessed by heavenly thoughts — then
shit
but they knew this would happen,
piss
but their lives could have told them — and it would be the same thing all over again, mayhem and panic and slaughter in the shadows of the Wilga shed where men pointed and dogs harried.

Nothing would ever change in the patterns of sheep. It was all written, all enacted, all fatal. No wonder sheep lay down and wouldn't get up. They knew about death but were dumb in the face of it. They seemed always at screaming point, rolling their eyes, keeping their lips sealed. Their only wish was to be left alone to work something out. What had they done? What was their crime? Why was it always their day of atonement? Sheep led the life of abused innocents. They were all children.

 

A shearer named Oxley with a pigtail like a pirate told anyone who listened that if they wanted to give him an enjoyable weekend they could just hand him a rifle and let him loose on the mob. ‘What cynic godhead made them?' asked an Australian poet. Move a mob one way it elected another — get them to jump a stream, and they'd run with the current, go over a cliff and drown. Banjo Paterson wrote: ‘Merinos made our men sardonic or they would weep'.

The Wilga cocky hardly ever smiled, but he grinned at Oxley's rifle-toting plan. He was victimised by sheep. He must have thought, if only sheep grew something other than wool. If only their booms didn't make him buy in panicky haste; if only their busts didn't make him suicidal. There were times when he could have ‘shore them and shot them and still made ten bucks a head'. Sheep dragged him out to drive through paddocks of dead ones. Their diseases and their doggedness bled his days of hours. In a boom year there was flystrike, barley grass, corkscrew grass blindness, no good workers on tap, just the dregs. Because of sheep his wife and children stayed in the city, living it up for as long as they could, or merely surviving. And so he went mad from want of society, with just the company of sheep. Look at these shearers here,
these Kiwis and odd bods, never taking wool from the right places, leaving second cuts, ignoring the hocks, blind to the meaning of a man's life, that is, his sheep — pissing off with a snarl if a legitimate word of criticism was breathed in defence of a man's clip, which would fetch — what? Anyone know?

Every wasted moment in the shed saw wool prices falling. Men were walking around scratching their arses when they should have been shearing. Every slow-down in the shed meant backlog in the holding paddocks. ‘It slows it all down and you've got less tucker for the following mobs to eat and then she sort of dominoes back,' raved the cocky. ‘If that eats the paddock then all the rest have got nothing or it half-eats it out and the next mob half-eats it out …'

It drove him back up to the house and back into the bottle again. He pulled the blinds. What he felt about sheep he shifted on to men. ‘Shearers are natural pigs. I know them. They look at the food and if there's just the right amount they think, “Oh, that's nice. I might want to come back for seconds”, so they take extra, and everyone when they sit down eats everything on their plate or tries to. But if there's plenty they think, “Oh, well, I can always come back for seconds”, so they leave it. And then they'll eat what's on their plate, they'll get talking to someone, forget they want more and therefore there's a heap to chuck out, whereas if just the right amount is cooked you run short; you'll never ever achieve the spot-on, everyone happy and there's nothing to throw out.'

He only wished he could din this into the heads of his sheep who ate through his dreams.

 

To get away from Wilga faster they shore on the weekend. Oxley said his Aussie mates might come over on Sunday afternoon and check them out. They were staunch unionists. He'd seen them in the pub on the way up there. They had a Maori girl shearer with them. They had a feeling there'd be shearing on Sunday and were dead against it. Oxley just said, fine, come on over, stay for tea.

‘I've fought my way from one end of Australia to the other,' boasted Oxley. ‘I'm not allowed in many pubs any more. You want to meet me, I'll say I'll meet you up at this pub, don't go to that one, that one or the other one because I'm barred from all them but I'm still all right in this one. We're a warlike race. That's why we're into fighting.'

Oxley's Aussie girlfriend said, ‘Oh, yeah, you fight because you're a bunch of dorks. You want to fight. You're male, you're up for it.'

The cook was in the kitchen the whole day checking the window to see if any vehicles were coming down the track. He had his escape route planned into the scrub. Nobody came.

 

When a red-eyed wether escaped, knocking people over and kicking through smoko boxes, spilling tea everywhere, ruining the cakes, bucking like an oversized maggot, he joined the chase.

He went round a corner of the wool bins and the wether propped, skidded, and met plenty of opposition, slipping the grasp of oversized men whose life was spent shearing, fighting, and playing rugby. They laughed and swore. Then he was the one.

He wasn't strong. His last game of rugby was thirty-five years ago in the under-sixteen F's, when he lay on Rose Bay oval feigning injury, watching legs run away from him, an interesting perspective. Now when a head groined him, anger caught flame. It was enough. The weight of the sheep knocked him over, but he rolled with the force, face full of burrs, holding on somehow, tongue tasting lanolined shit, hearing the scrabble of hooves on greasy boards till a hand reached down and released him.

It was Oxley's hand. ‘Good on ya, Cookie' — Oxley getting his sheep back, kneeling on it, kneeing it hard, punishing it for being a sheep, releasing a nasty oof from its lungs before he shore the rest of the wool off, with lots of careless cuts and the cocky glaring at him.

‘Gerrouta of my sight, ya blowfly,' Oxley muttered into
the wool, swivelling himself around, aiming his arse at the cocky, sweat flying.

Cookie went outside to clean up. Washing his face and hands at the tankstand, cooling off, he told himself that full-on anger and ceaseless obsession were a warning, a caution. What was the point of it? He was angry when the sheep rammed him, but he couldn't stay angry. His hatred of sheep was team dislike, solidarity with Oxley, understanding of the owner.

Around the yards, sheep's baffled, philosophical eyes watched him as if in a dream of himself. Sheep weren't as separate as he thought.

He used his brain like a sheep would. Looked back the other way from the sheep-angle, easing his head around stiffly, not blinking, shivering in the dust and forty-degree heat, allowing his pulse-rate to quicken at shadows, to slow when a wagtail leapt on his head. He let himself doze while a green fly tickled folds of pink skin and laid an egg there. He moved from moment to moment without any feeling of consequence or memory. He saw sheep and people gliding together. He felt how a sheep feels, let through a gate, leaping and flying with brief freedom. He felt himself settle and fan across the earth, the most perfect of sheep moments, the mob spreading, the only sound a determined ripping of grass-stems. This was the life of the sheep! Then a sound, maybe just another sheep coughing, and all of us look up. We wait for movement at the corners of our eyes. One of our number starts to scamper, and it's as if a message is passed around,
This is it, the big moment. Go for it!
Galloping and thundering in the dust we go to hell.

It was no good. He could never go the whole way with sheep. There was no way through. Sheep were a closed circle.

There at Wilga yards dogs lay flat in the dust, eyes bright for the chance of relationship. A station hand came past, offering a friendly smoke. The cocky's sister-in-law, up for holidays to help with the shearing, smiled at him under the brim of her hat as she whipped past on her
motorbike, long hair flying. Nice woman — the guys all watched her, looking for a chance, always hoping.

This wouldn't happen among sheep.

For sheep, love possibilities were no go. The ram moved through the mob serving a hundred ewes a night and still the ewes munched into the dawn unmoved. Separation from human responses was total. No deal, said sheep. We are as unlike you as you can imagine. Only you cannot imagine. Your betrayal is complete even as you hold us prisoner to your responses. Sheep — if they could say it — would prefer a redefinition of their role, right down to mutual non-existence. Go a-fucking-way from here, they would ask. If they could colonise another planet they would. Make it Mars — red dust, lack of water, ferocious winds. Just the ticket. Once, back in genetic history, sheep must have been going somewhere, must have had a master mystical plan. But something had happened, some hurt, some shock in the species' childhood.

Say it was when the first shepherd appeared.

Say it was the first shearer.