Back of Sunset

“Take it easy, Charles. I’m fed up. But not with you – nor with what we’ve had together these past seven years. I like the cream and cakes as much as you. It’s just” – he searched for the right words, trying not to be melodramatic – “I’m lost, Charles. I haven’t got the faintest bloody idea where I’m going. Oh, I know, next year I’m going to England, I’m going to be just as successful over there – if Rona has her way—” His voice trailed off. He stood beside Goodyear at the window, watching two nurses hurry across the yard, their heads ducked against the first flurry of rain that had begun to fall: their cloaks stood out behind them like wings, but they were not angels of mercy, just two laughing girls rushing to get in out of the rain.

The steam had gone out of Goodyear. “You’re not keen on going?” Stephen shook his head. “What do you want to do then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if I had a holiday, got away, had a chance to sort things out—”

“I’m sorry for what I said about your dad.” Goodyear nodded his head emphatically. “I admired him, Stephen, you’ve got no idea how much. He was too much of an idealist, though, too much of a dreamer. That was what killed him in a way – he always took more care of other people than he did of himself—”

“I know. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it – a doctor dying of a chill? But he got up at three o’clock that morning, after having been on his feet all week – remember, that was the bad polio scare? – and he went out into that storm to attend to a drunken woman who turned out only to have a sprained muscle. The thing was, though, he’d have gone anyway, because she was terrified. Would you have gone, Charles?”

Goodyear was honest: “I don’t think so. Especially if I’d known it was a drunken woman. I’m a moralist when it comes to drunken women.” He put a hand to his head. “Or drunks of any sort.”

“I wouldn’t have gone,” said Stephen. “And that’s one of the questions I want to ask myself, if I can get away – Why wouldn’t I go out in the rain for a frightened woman? Aren’t doctors supposed to be good for moral comfort as well? Is that where my work stops – at operations and pills and bandages and making money?” The rain spattered against the window: he looked out at a world blurred as if by tears. “I wonder what ever happened to that woman that night? I wonder if she ever feels remorse if she knew that Dad died because of her?”

“No patient ever thinks that of his doctor.” Goodyear sounded cynical, but it was the truth. “Has any patient told you you looked tired these past couple of weeks? Last year when you had Asian ’flu, did any of them ask how you were? Me, neither. They pay us their bills and some of them add their gratitude as an extra. But none of them ever gives you any sympathy. When you die some of them might grieve for you, if you were a good enough bloke – I think a lot might have grieved for your dad. But none of them ever gives a thought to the fact that he might have killed you. The most heartless one in the doctor-patient relationship, believe me, is the patient.” Goodyear straightened his tie; the long hands shook a little. “Where would you go for your holiday?”

Where to go? The mind, as much as the body, needed the holiday. And where to take it? Stephen thought. Mentally, he was lazy; he had never been one for exercising his mind. When he read for instruction or the banking up of a little wisdom, he read only medical books; all his other reading was purely for entertainment, library souffle. He had never played chess or mah-jongg or indulged in esoteric contemplations: his mind, if it was tired, was tired because it had had such little exercise to condition it: it was run down from a surfeit of small talk. And yet where was he to go, that it might be revived? He was not an intellectual, a professor of philosophy who could benefit from a sabbatical amid European founts; nor an artist, who could break away from the back-biting galleries crowd and go off on his own. He would not gain by going to Melbourne or Brisbane, to talk with other doctors in an atmosphere of abstraction, away from the schedule of operations, visits and surgery hours: he was clear-sighted enough to know that, practically speaking, he was not backward in the art of healing. Australia was a vast place, but now all at once it seemed to offer him nowhere to go.

“I don’t know.” Stephen shoved his hands deep into his jacket pocket. His fingers came up against something hard and sharp: without taking it from his pocket he knew it was an aboriginal charm. His hand closed on it: it could be another portent, another door opening somewhere to a future he had never glimpsed. He was a Catholic, but all his life he had believed in pagan luck, and he knew he was not alone.

“I’m going to Winnemincka,” he said, and looked with something like triumph at the expression that could have been envy on Goodyear’s face.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_4f469534-9226-5da9-b1c1-c64c7c5fd523)

At first in the glare, with the world tilted sideways against the window of the plane, Stephen didn’t see Winnemincka. All he saw was the great greenish-blue shield of the gulf and the black wounds on the yellow land that he knew were the shadows behind the flat-topped mountains. Then there was a glint, like a tear in the giant jaundiced eye that was the round window of the plane; the plane dropped lower and he saw the car coming out along the road, spinning dust behind it towards the town. Winnemincka lay against the base of the steep, flat-topped hill, its buildings marked in the glare only by the pock-mark of their shadows: sunlight flashed on a window but the flash was hardly remarkable in the bright intense light.

“That’s it,” said the shearer sitting next to Stephen. “The arse-end of Australia. Maybe of the world, I dunno. I wouldn’t wanna look for worse than this.’’

“Why do you come up here?” Stephen’s ears cracked as the plane went steeply down.

“The money’s good. What have you come up for?”

A holiday: Stephen looked out at the vast bare land and knew the answer would be ridiculous. “I’m on a research trip. I’m a doctor.”

“Thought a doc would have found enough to do down in the city.” The shearer loosened his seat belt as the plane touched down and swung round to taxi back along the strip. He looked out with a sour eye as the boab tree, its arms lifted in obscene gestures, went by the window. “Bloke wants his head read, coming up here. But it’s the money. It’s always the money.”

Stephen loosened his seat belt and stretched. It had been a long journey already, yet he knew he was really only at the beginning of it. The long flight from Sydney to Darwin in the Britannia: the business men going to London, their brashness increasing as they got farther from home, nobody in London or Hamburg or Rome was going to scare them, let me tell you; the girl singer on her way to Singapore, her speaking voice a thin pain in the ear; the missionary and his wife, their hands clasped together, their free hands clutching small Bibles, depending on God and each other for support in the wilderness that lay ahead of them. The trip down from Darwin in the old Douglas: the pearling captain who reeked of drink, six weeks of it; the meat-workers, washed and scrubbed, who somehow still seemed to reek of blood; the two aboriginal stockmen, used to buck-jumpers and wild cattle, wide-eyed with fright as the plane rode smoothly through the blazing sky. And the shearer, who came up here only for the money.

“Be seeing you, doc; enjoy yourself – although I doubt it. It’s a bastard of a country.”

He went down the aisle of the plane and Stephen followed him. The hostess smiled at him, wishing him luck; and he stepped out of the plane into the glare and a thick miasma of flies. He smote at the flies with one hand while Jack Tristram grabbed the other.

“Welcome, son. Stone the crows, you know, I wondered if you’d really come, know what I mean? Welcome back, Steve.”

Welcome back: Stephen hadn’t thought of his coming up here in terms of a return. But it was, of course. He had spent only six months here and he had been only seven years old at the time; he could remember little of the time or the place, but there was no denying his arrival here now was a return.

Tristram continued to talk as he led Stephen across the dusty strip towards a parked utility truck. Behind the truck there was a rusted galvanised-iron hangar: a small plane stood within its gloom, a bird that knew enough to come in out of the sun. A blaze of white parrakeets swung down with a loud screech and settled in the boab tree beside the shed. Three aboriginal children stood thin-legged, like cranes, in the black pools of their own shadow; an old gin, her face dark and lined as an empty water-bag, sat with her back against the post of a faded sign that proclaimed: Winnemincka Airport. The flies thickened, as if they recognised a newcomer who had not been tasted, and Stephen smote at them continuously and with increasing temper.

“This is Kate Brannigan,” Tristram was saying, taking Stephen’s bag from him and swinging it into the back of the truck. “And this is the Flying Doc, Phil Covici. This is Steve McCabe. You’ve heard me talk of his old man.”

Because of the glare and the flies Stephen had not noticed the man and girl standing beside the truck. Covici was in his fifties, black-haired, fat, jovial, unkempt: his buttonless shirt was open to his waist, his shorts were held up by an old tie, bare horny feet were encased in old sandals: only the purpose-fulness in the dark merry face stopped you from writing him off as just another beachcomber. He had an organ roll of a laugh that would be no help to him as a doctor: it would only broadcast how healthy he himself was. He thrust out a hand in which a meat chopper would have looked more at home than a scalpel.

“G’day, Steve. Glad to have you here. Hope I can show you enough to make your trip worthwhile.”

Stephen looked at him, puzzled; but the girl had stepped forward and he turned to her. She was dressed in a man’s khaki shirt and trousers; beside Covici she looked as neat as a page boy. She had high wide cheekbones, a firm straight nose and a full-lipped mouth; her face was too strong for real beauty, but it was a face that would always attract a stranger’s gaze. Only the eyes softened it: they were dark, heavy-lidded and with the longest lashes Stephen had ever seen. They were a woman’s eyes, for coquetry or the mirroring of passion; but now they appeared almost hostile. Her handclasp was firm but not encouraging.

“I’m the base radio operator,” Kate Brannigan said, and Stephen felt he was expected to know more than she had just told him. She looked at the brown linen suit and the white panama he wore; his suede shoes could have been cloven hoofs the way she looked at them. She opened the door of the truck. “You’d better ride in the front with Doc and me. We can’t get you dirtied so soon after getting off the plane.”

There was no contempt in her voice: it was too well-trained, had read too many private telegrams over the radio: it was impersonal as a news reader’s. But there was no mistaking the look in the eyes: they would never be able to disguise what the girl thought. Stephen turned away from her and clambered into the back of the truck beside Tristram.

“I want to talk to Jack. Don’t worry about my getting dirty.”

Kate drove as if she had never been troubled by traffic nor traffic lights. The truck bumped along the rutted road at fifty miles an hour; it sucked in dust behind it in a thick red cloud. Stephen sat on his bag, clutching at the sides of the truck with both hands; the flies had fled as soon as the dust had begun to swirl in.

“What’s the matter with her?” Stephen had to shout above the noise of the truck. “What’s she got against me?”

“She’ll be all right!” Tristram had taken his teeth out as soon as they got into the back of the truck; his lips and gums were rimmed with a red paste of spittle and dust. “She’s always like that with strangers from down south!”

“What about Covici? He sounded as if he was expecting me!”

The truck lurched and Tristram sprawled against Stephen. “I told ’em you were coming up here to look at the Flying Doctor set-up! What else did you come for?”

Stephen, already stiff and sore, his mouth full of dust, said nothing. He had gone out to the airport at Mascot a week ago to farewell Tristram and had then told him he would be coming to Winnemincka. There in the noisy bustling waiting-room it had somehow been difficult to tell Tristram he would be coming north only as a form of retreat, to escape from the surroundings that had begun to fit him too tightly, like a weil-worn suit that had all at once become a straitjacket; he was not even making a sentimental journey, because he was too matter-of-fact to feel sentiment about a place he could barely remember. He had just told Tristram he would be coming, and left it at that. And Tristram, still seeing in him the faint ghost of Tom McCabe, had made his own conclusion.

Then they were coming into Winnemincka. Mangrove swamps stretched out a mile or more to the copper-tinged slash of the sea: a memory came back to Stephen, something he had read at school or perhaps his father had told him, of a forty-foot tide on this part of the north-west coast. Behind the town the flat-topped mountain rose steeply like a giant red anvil; eagles cruised above it, small black crosses against the faded blue of heaven. The town had only one street: half mile long and fifty yards wide: it had once been a cattle track A mob of cattle under a slow thin cloud of dust moved down the street now, headed towards the meat-works at the shore end of the mile-long jetty; the truck swept round the cattle, brushing against a rough fence in front of a ramshackle cottage, and went on down the street. They went by an immense boab standing squarely in the middle of the road, like some bloated giant with his numerous arms raised in agony: another memory came back to Stephen, one of experience this time, of games played in the broken shade of this tree with half a dozen aboriginal and half-caste children. The truck went by two single-storied hotels, spinning dus’t towards the men who lounged on the wide verandas: Stephen noticed that one of the hotels had no glass in any of its windows: a man climbed out of a window as they went by, lugging a heavy sack after him, ignored by the men on the veranda.

“This place was a busy port back in the old days,” Tristram gasped through the dust. “Had ten thousand people here, one time. Got a hundred and fifty now, counting the half-castes and the meat-workers when they come up for the season.”

They passed the ruin of the Grand Hotel, a two-storied structure with no roof; a strip of ornamental railing hung from an upper balcony like tattered lace. A goat chased by two dogs came bounding out of the shell of another large building.

“The Music Hall,” said Tristram, and Stephen saw the faded and peeling posters on the crumbling walls: Matt Mia, Lightning Sketch Artist, The Golden Girls, a long line of black-stockinged legs faded and rat-chewed. “Now we have pictures once a week in the open air. Marilyn Monroe and a million mosquitoes, all for five bob.”

The truck slowed abruptly and came to a halt: dust billowed in in a thick cloud. It cleared and Stephen saw Kate Brannigan looking at him. “You’ll get used to the dust, Dr. McCabe. It’s part of the diet up here.”

Stephen climbed out and took his bag as Tristram handed it to him. Dust was thick on his clothes and on his face, but he would not give Kate Brannigan the satisfaction of seeing him brush it off; he even managed to ignore the flies that descended on him like black hail.

“This is where you’ll be staying, with the doc,” Tristram said, the dust cracking on his face like a crumbling mask. “I’m dossed out in the pindan with me mate. I didn’t think you’d wanna be out there.”

“I should damned well think not,” said Covici. “Where else would a doctor stay in this flea-hole but at the hospital? I can tell you, Steve, this is the only decent accommodation in town. We’ve always got more patients here than the pubs have guests.”

The hospital was a low rambling building that looked as if it had been added to, a room at a time. A wide veranda, screened with fine wire-netting, ran right round the building; the two cottages on either side of the main building were protected from the sun and the flies in the same way. Behind the main building a windmill flashed a meaningless heliograph in the bright sun; Stephen wondered where the breeze that drove it was coming from, because he could feel none where he stood. Beyond the gate at which the truck had pulled up, stretching right across the front of the hospital and its two attendant cottages, were a lawn and a garden, both brown and dusty looking: two crows walked on the lawn, deathly impersonators of peacocks. A gin went slowly round the side of the main building, a bundle of washing on her head, two naked piccaninnies clutching at her skirt. Somewhere inside the hospital a baby cried, and a bell rang in a tinny summons.

“That’s my place,” said Covici, pointing to the cottage on the left. “And that’s the radio base. Kate lives there.”

The second cottage was slightly larger than Covici’s. Behind it a tall radio mast stabbed at the empty sky, as if defying the space above it: this had been a land of vast silence till the radio had come to dispel the loneliness and, sometimes, the helplessness.

“I’d like to see you at work some time,” Stephen said to Kate.

“Any time,” said Kate, and opened the gate and walked up the path that led to her cottage.