The Complete Stories (7 page)

I don't know how far I had gone before I paused, looked around, and realised I was lost. For the last ten minutes I had been walking in my sleep. The landscape of small shrubs and ti-trees I had been moving through was now scrub.

I consulted the sun and turned back the way I had come. Minutes later I looked again and changed tack. It was hot. I had begun to sweat. I took my shirt off, draped it round my neck, and set off again.

Five minutes more and I stopped, told myself sternly not to panic and, standing with my eyes closed and the whole landscape shrilling in my head, took half a dozen slow breaths.

The shot came from closer than I would have expected, and from a direction—to my left—that surprised me. How had I gone so wrong? It was only when I had got over a small rush of relief that it struck me that after the first shot there had been no other. I quickened my pace, then began to run, my boots sinking and at times slipping on the swampy ground. When I arrived back at the clearing Stuart lay awkwardly sprawled, white-lipped and holding his shirt, which was already soaked, to his bloodied thigh.

“Hi, Angus,” he said, his tone somewhere between his old, false jauntiness and a dreamy bemusement at what had occurred and at my being the one who had arrived to find him.

“Better get someone. Quick, eh?”

He glanced down to where blood, a lot of it, I thought, was flooding through the flimsy shirt.

I fell to my knees, gaping.

“No,” he said calmly. “Just run off as quick as you can, mate, and fetch someone. But be quick, eh? I'll be right for a bit.”

I wasn't sure of that. I felt there was something I should be doing immediately, something I should be saying that would make him feel better and restore things, maybe even cancel them out, and I was still nursing this childish thought as I sprinted towards the camp. Something I would regret for ever if he bled to death before I got back.
Was
he bleeding to death? Could a thing like that just happen, without warning, out of the blue?

In just minutes I had shouted my breathless announcement and we were back.

He was still sitting, awkwardly upright, his back against the log. I took in the rifle this time. It lay on the ground to his right. There was also the heap of dull black feathers that was a scrub-turkey He was no longer holding the soaked rag to his outflung leg. A pool was spreading under him. He was streaming with sweat. Great drops of it stood on his brow and were making runnels down his chest.

“It's all right, Dad,” he said weakly when the old man and Matt and the others reached him. “Bugger missed.”

It took me a moment to grasp that it was the bullet he was referring to.

They got his boot off and Matt slashed the leg of the scorched and bloodied jeans all the way to the crotch and worked quickly to apply a tourniquet. “You'll be right,” he told Stuart. “Bugger missed the main artery, you're a lucky feller. Bone too.” Blood was seeping out between his hands. There was a smell that made me squeamish. Seared meat. Stuart, bluish-white around the mouth, was raised up on his elbows and staring, fascinated by the throbbing out of the warm life in him. Like a child who has borne a bad fall manfully, but bursts into tears at the first expression of sympathy, he seemed close to breaking.

I was dealing with my own emotions.

I had seen Stuart stripped any number of times, in the changing room at the pool, in the noise and general roughhouse of the showers afterwards. A naked body among other naked bodies, with clear water streaming over it and a smell of clean soap in the air, is bracing, functional, presents an image too common to be remarkable or to draw attention to itself. But a single ravaged limb thrust out in the dirt, the soaked denim of the jeans that covered it violently ripped and peeled away, black hairs curling on the hollow of the thigh and growing furlike close to the groin, has a brute particularity that brought me closer to something exposed and shockingly intimate in him, to the bare forked animal, than anything I had seen when he stood fully naked under the shower. I was shaken. His jockeys, where they showed, sagged, and were worn thin and greyish. A trail of blood, still glistening wet, made its way down the long ridge of the shank bone.

Not much more than half an hour ago I had walked out on him. Exasperated. Worn down by the demands he put on me. At the end of my patience with his turmoil, the poses he struck, his callow pretensions to martyrdom. Now I was faced with a shocking reality. It was.

Stuart McGowan's blood I was staring at. What impressed me, in the brute light of day, was its wetness, how much there was of it, the alarming blatancy of its red.

He caught the look on my face, and something in what he saw there encouraged him back into a bravado he had very nearly lost the trick of.

“Angus,” he said. He might just have noticed me there in the tense crowd around him and recalled that I was the one who had found him. “Waddya think then?” He managed a crooked smile, and his voice, though strained, had the same half-jokey, half-defensive tone as when on those early visits to my sleepout he had picked up one of my books and asked, "So what's this one about?”

As if on this occasion too he were faced with a puzzle on which I might somehow enlighten him, and in the same expectation, I thought, of being given credit for the seriousness of his interest.

A smile touched the corner of his lips.

He was pleased with himself!

At being the undoubted centre of so much drama and concern. At having done something at last that shocked me into really looking at him, into taking him seriously. The wound was worth it, that's what he thought. All it demanded of him was that he should grit his teeth and bear a little pain, physical pain, be a man; he had all the resources in the world for that. And what he gained was what he saw in
me.
Which, when I got back, I would pass on to her, to Katie. When she was presented with the facts—that hole in his naked thigh with its raw and blackened lips, the near miss that had come close to draining him of the eight pints of rude animal life that was in him—she would have to think again and accept what she had denied: the tribute of his extravagant suffering, the real and visible workings of his pure, bull-like heart. He had done this for
her
!

“Okay,” Matt Riley was saying. “That's the best we can do for now.”

He got to his feet, rubbed his hands on the cloth of his thighs, and told Jem: "You—-Jem—we'll need some sort of stretcher to get ‘im to the truck. See what you can knock up.” Then, quietly, to Wes McGowan: "The quicker we get ‘im back to town now the better. It's not as bad as it looks. Bullet went clean through. Bugger'll need watchin', but.”

It took me a moment to grasp that what was being referred to this time was the wound.

In all the panic and excitement around Stuart, I had lost sight of Braden. He was hunched on the ground a little way off, his back to Stuart and the rest, his head bowed. I thought he was crying. He wasn't, but he was shaking. I squatted beside him.

“You okay?” I asked. I thought he hadn't heard me. “It's just a flesh wound,” I told him. “Nothing serious. He's lost a bit of blood, but.”

He gave a snort. Then a brief contemptuous laugh.

Was that what it was? Contempt?

He thought Stuart had done it deliberately! I was astonished. But wasn't that just what I had assumed a moment back, when I told “He's done this for her"?

I touched Braden lightly on the shoulder, then got up and turned again to where Stuart, wrapped in a blanket now and with his eyes closed, but still white-lipped and sweating, lay waiting for the pallet to be brought.

I told myself that it had never occurred to me that he would go so far. It was too excessive, too wide of what was acceptable to the code we lived by. A hysterical girl might do such a thing but not a man, not Stuart McGowan's sort of man. But at the edge of that I was shaken. Maybe what I thought I knew about people—about Stuart, about myself—was unreliable. I looked at Stuart and saw, up ahead, something that had not come to me yet but must come some day. Not a physical shattering but what belongs to the heart and its confusions, the mess of need, desire, hurt pride, and all the sliding versions of himself as lover triumphant, then as lover rejected and achingly bereft, that had led him to force things—had he?—to such lurid and desperate conclusions.

I considered again the nest of coppery hair he sported in the scoop of his underlip.

When it first appeared I had taken it, in a worrying way, as a dandified affectation, out of character with the Stuart I knew. I was less ready now with my glib assumptions. What did I know of Stuart McGowan's “character” as I called it? Of what might or might not belong to it?

After a moment he opened his eyes, caught me watching, and in an appeal perhaps to some old complicity between us that for a good time now had been under threat, but which the shock of his near miss had re-established, he winked. Only when I failed to respond did it strike him that he might have miscalculated.

He struggled to one elbow, his head tilted, his brow in a furrow, and
grinned, but sheepishly, as if I had caught him out in something furtive, unmanly. “So how's tricks, Angus? How's it goin'?” he enquired. “You okay?”

This time I did not turn my back on him, but I did walk away, even while I stood watching. Jem and Glen had come up with their makeshift stretcher, and Matt Riley and his father, with Henry Denkler directing, rolled him onto it, all of them quieting his sharp intakes of breath with ritual assurances, most of them wordless. For some reason, what I remember most clearly is the three-day grime on the back of Glen McGowan's neck as he bent to settle Stuart. And through it all, deep in myself, I was walking away fast into a freshening distance in which my own grime was being miraculously washed away.

Walking lightly. The long grass swishing round my boots as the sparse brush drew me on. Into the vastness of small sounds that was a continent. To lose myself among its flutings and flutterings, the glow of its moist air and sun-charged chemical green, its traffic of unnumbered slow ingenious agencies.

An hour later we had loaded up and were on our way home: Stuart well wrapped in an old quilt, laid out in the tray of the McGowans’ ute with his father to tend him, Glen driving, and Henry Denkler, who seemed troubled and out of sorts, in the cabin beside him. Braden and I, seated high up on a pile of bedrolls and packs, rode in the back of Matt Riley's beaten-up ute with the guns, a mess of dogs, and all our gear.

I sat, my back to the side of the truck, with Tilly between my knees, leaning forward occasionally to hug her to me, and receiving in return a soulful, brown-eyed look of pure affection. How straightforward animals are, I thought. As compared to people, with their left-handed unhappy agendas, their sore places hidden even from themselves.

I thought uneasily of Stuart, bumping about now in the other ute as it wallowed through waist-high grass down the unmarked track; still believing, perhaps, that Katie would be impressed by the badge of a near fatality he would be wearing when we got back.

Would she be? I didn't think so, but I could no longer be sure. She kept eluding my grasp. As Stuart had. And Braden.

I glanced across at him. He had pushed his hat off, though the cord was still tight under his chin, and his eyes were narrowed, his cheeks taut as he grasped the side of the ute with one hand to steady himself against its rolling and stared into space. After a moment, aware of my
scrutiny, he turned, and for the first time in a while he smiled his old wry smile, which meant he had returned, more or less, to being relaxed again. Inside his own head. But not in a way that excluded my being in tune with him. I sat back, giving myself up to the air that came streaming over the cabin top as the ute emerged at last on to bitumen, turned north, and put on speed.

We were less than thirty miles from home now. The land was growing uneven. Soon there would be canefields on either side of the steeply dipping road, dairy farms smelling of silage, and little smooth-crowned hills that had once been wooded and dark with aerial roots and vines, till the loggers and land-clearers moved in and opened all this country to the sky, letting the light in; creating a landscape lush and green, with only, in the gully breaks between, a remnant of the old darkness and mystery, a cathedral gloom where a smell of damp-rot lingered that was older than the scent of cane flowers or the ammoniac stench of wet cow flop, and where creatures still moved about the forest floor, or hung in rows as in a wardrobe high up in the branches, or glided noiselessly from bough to bough.

I must have nodded off. When I looked up, we were already speeding through settlements I recognised and knew the names of: wooden houses, some of them no more than shacks, set far back and low among isolated forest trees, the open spaces on either side of the bitumen strip narrowing so quickly that what there was of a township—a service station, a Greek milk bar and caf—was gone again before you could catch the name on a signpost or register the slightly different smell on the air that signified settled life and neighbourliness.

I loved all this. But Katie was right. I too would leave. As she would, as Braden would.

He met my eye now and then, as the ute swung out to pass a slower vehicle and we had to reach for the side and hang on to steady ourselves, but I was less certain now that I could read his looks. He had already begun to move away.

The difference was, I thought, that he, like Katie, would not come back. But for me there could be no final leaving. This greenish light, full and luminous, always with a heaviness in it that was a reminder of the underlying dark—like the persistent memory, under even the most open of cleared land, of the dankness of rainforests—was for me the light by which all moments of expectation and high feeling would in
my mind for ever be touched. This was the country I would go on dreaming in, wherever I lay my head.

We were bounding along now. Sixty miles an hour. From the cabin of the truck, Jem Riley's voice, raw and a little tuneless, came streaming past my ear. “Goodnight, Irene,” was what he was singing, "I'll see you in my dreams.”