The Sunken Road Read online

  Sunken

  For most of its length the Bitter Wash Road, like any road, scribbled across the landscape in plain view, but for a short distance—linking Showalter Park and Isonville—it wound along the bottom of a gorge. The best-preserved sections of stonewall fencing in the mid-north stood on this section of the road. The locals liked to say that the early Showalters, for whom the road was built, could not tolerate losing good grazing land and so the road was trained along the stony gorge, which was useless for anything else. In Anna’s mind it was the sunken road, a name she’d absorbed from the cradle. Everyone on Isonville called it the sunken road. She saw that it sank from view and supposed that that was how it got its name. But when she took the sunken road into the wider world, she met snideness and incomprehension. Fiercely she defended the name, and cried in frustration: They laughed at me. Her mother swung her on to her knee: Ignore them, sweetheart. It’s just a name Grandpa brought back from the war, after a trench he dug to fight the Germans. The road began at a T-junction on the Main North Road, between the Redruth Gaol ruins and a row of miners’ cottages built for the Cornish Jacks in 1856. First it passed through a region of undersized farm blocks, ten- and twenty-acre patches of erosion and helplessness, fenced tiredly with rusted wire and rotting posts, where clamorous quick families, the Kellys among them, spilled out of fibro houses and balding hens scrabbled among the car parts buried in the dead grass. Between Showalter Park and Isonville the road sank from view, appearing again through an area of small farms, alienated by the Strangways Act into lots of up to six hundred and forty acres. It finished at Bitter Wash, a collection of stone ruins somewhere behind the Razorback. Muddy in winter, corrugated in summer: these were the two constants of the sunken road, no matter how often the district council ran a grader over it. Road signs warned of hairpin bends and rockfalls, but the untried, the careless and the trusting continued to scrape their cars against the stony edges or spin out on the gravelly corners. Everyone had a sunken road story—a cracked windscreen, a blown tyre, a lost hub cap, a near miss, a kangaroo skittled at sunset. The dust boiled thick as talc in the summer months; you’d drive with your headlights on for safety. Sometimes you could sit for an hour by the side of the road and not see another car. One day Mrs Mac made the school-run. She collected Anna and Hugo from the shop at four o’clock, passed the time of day with Grandfather Tolley, said: Home, James, and at four-fifteen felt the rear tyre blow and shred and throw Auntie Beulah’s car from side to side in the gravel banked at the road’s edge. Phew! That was exciting, she said. She got out, looked critically at the tyre, and rummaged in the boot. When was the last time anyone checked this car? she demanded. No wheel brace, and the jack was seized up with rust. Anna and Hugo said nothing, feeling obscurely ashamed. The minutes passed and Mrs Mac began to tap her fingers on the steering wheel. I could do with a drink. Half-past four, a quarter to five, five o’clock. Godforsaken country. I need my head read. She snorted: Her ladyship won’t be pleased. She’ll be wanting her tea in a minute. Anna’s ears burned to hear Auntie Beulah talked about like that. She looked out. A rundown house stood a short distance back from the road. As she watched, children began to drift into the yard from the house. The Kellys. She knew Lockie from school. The Kellys were quick, funny and risky, but that day they stared and she stared back at them and there was no movement in the landscape until the stud manager from Showalter Park found them, thirty minutes later. Vegetation grew thickly on the broad verges of the sunken road—rye grass, wild oats, Salvation Jane, dandelions, soursobs, lucerne, and wheat, barley and oats sowed by the grain-spills from passing trucks. It was understood that a man whose paddocks had been eaten to the bone may take his sheep on to the sunken road and so keep them alive for another day. A welling kind of love rose in Anna’s breast as she read her father’s letter: My darling first born. How are things at the varsity? Your old man’s sitting in the ute again, pad propped on his knee, minding the sheep in glorious spring sunshine. We could do with a good soaking rain (where have I heard that before, I hear you ask). The feed at the side of the sunken road isn’t going to last forever. Anna read through to the end and his voice was in her head, the smell of sunbaked earth and air in her nostrils. She went to the college payphone in the corridor outside her room: Mum, I’m coming home for the weekend. Can you pick me up at the station? She called another number: Mrs Kelly? Tell Lockie I’ll be up for the weekend. When Anna’s son was killed on the sunken road, Carl Hartwig wrote in the Chronicle: It’s time the Council did something—sealed it, straightened the bends, put in guardrails, anything to stop these senseless deaths. But what were you doing on that part of the road anyway? Sam wanted to know. It’s miles out of your way. It was a fair question. Anna supposed that she deserved it. Wariness in her daughter’s eyes, reproach and suspicion in her husband’s. The sunken road is to be sealed soon, a gift from the government in the lead-up to the town’s 150th Jubilee celebration in the year 2000. Money talks, Anna says. Do you think funding would have been approved by junketing MPs if our application had gone in after the Park and all its millions had gone belly-up? But Sam is jubilant: This is a feather in our caps. We could time the opening ceremony to coincide with the Jubilee Parade. When Anna visits from the city in the years to come, she will drive along the sunken road and be struck by how broken-down it’s become, the bitumen holed, buckled and unloved now that the Showalters are long gone and the Council is strapped for cash. She will be blasted off the road once or twice by tour buses heading back from photographing the wildflowers around the claypans on the dark side of the Razorback, and feel her heart leap into her mouth again, no fun for an old woman.

  Split

  Isonville used to be five times the size it is now, sweetheart. Anna knew the story. Grandfather Ison returned from the Western Front in 1919 to find his parents dead of influenza and the broad acres parcelled up among his many married sisters. The homestead itself and five thousand acres had gone to Beulah, the unmarried sister. My poor Dad, Anna’s mother said. He felt betrayed. He had a young wife to provide for, then I was born, then your Uncle Kitch. One day he simply set off to carve out a new place in scrubland near Pinnaroo, intending to send for us later, but he lost his reason in all that solitude, and we had to go and find him and bring him back. I was only two at the time, Kitch was just a baby. Auntie Beulah took pity on us, bless her heart, and signed Isonville over to him, with the understanding that she could live here until the day she died. So we lived down this end of the house and she lived up the other end. Kitch and I used to go and say goodnight to her, just like you kids do. She’d say: Eleanor, Kitchener, a kiss if you please. Oh, she was hard to love sometimes. She wore my poor mother out. It’s a good thing Mrs Mac doesn’t take any nonsense. Now go and tell her goodnight. Anna and Hugo, in pyjamas and dressing-gowns, approached the stained-glass door at the mid-point of the house. In their minds a mad woman and a wrinkled crone lived on the other side. Every night they saw the old woman creep from one low-wattage patch of embroidered upholstery to another. Great Aunt Beulah jerked awake. Her lips moved. The children shut their senses down, brushed her cheek, sprang back from her chair. High, high where the air was close, dim and laden, Mrs Mac’s teeth glistened down at them: Night, night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite. Grandfather Ison came up from Adelaide once a month, sleeping in the spare bed in Hugo’s room. According to Hugo, Grandpa Ison’s bottom was very round, very white. He stayed long enough to open and close a few gates, ride around the sheep with Uncle Kitch, give Mrs Mac her pay, check to see that she hadn’t been hitting the bottle, then hurried in relief back to the city. Anna was twelve when the old ones died and Uncle Kitch inherited Isonville. Her mother inherited nothing but a dusty sideboard, and Anna came to understand that her mother heard an aggrieved justification beneath the dry tone of Grandfather Ison’s will: When I came home in 1919 I found my sisters and their husbands sitting on land that should have gone to me. The Isons would have been as big as the Showalters if no
t for that. I will not let my own son suffer so. It’s only fair that Isonville should go to Kitchener. After all, you have Peter to support you. Uncle Kitch stopped Anna on the broad verandah one day and said: How’s the house-hunting coming along? Anna retorted: Why? Getting impatient? During her second year away at the university, Anna felt herself growing apart from Lockie. They argued about the war, the call-up, how a life should be led: No, Lockie, I don’t want us to split up. What, then? I don’t know, she said miserably. But Anna saw that he looked out of place, felt out of place, in the corridors of Women’s College at ten minutes to ten—his hair, his outdoors skin, his beat-up utility in the street outside. Soon she was saying in her head the words: I have taken another lover. One night Lockie shadowed her to a house in Unley, and he waited outside for her until the bitter dawn: Are you two-timing me? Was I just an interlude for you? Later there was a postcard, just one, cheerfully describing the sun stretched like fire upon the South China Sea, and Anna thought that her heart might split open. She took comfort from the notion of a lucky wound. Grandfather Ison’s journal:

  Pozières Heights, 15 August 1916. The fellow next to me has had the great good fortune to suffer a ‘lucky wound’ to the shoulder. It will remove him to England and then home by ship to his wife, lucky blighter.

  So maybe Lockie would only be separated from her temporarily, and come home intact when his two years were up, or at worst be winged and come home sooner. It all came down to how her own luck was running. On the day that Anna married Sam Jaeger, she danced with her father-in-law. He grasped both of her shoulders, waggled his head from side to side: Well, well, well, Mrs Jaeger, I presume? Anna blinked, wondering wildly for a moment: A Jaeger? A Tolley? Who am I? Within five years Sam was saying: A pittance, that’s all my old man pays me. Never gives me a say in running the place. Always looking over our shoulders, feeding garbage to the kids. Well, I’ve had enough. It’s time we split. And so Anna and Sam found themselves snatching a morning here, an afternoon there, inspecting hovels to-let on forgotten back roads behind the Razorback, a land of nettles and heartbreak. It would have broken Anna’s heart to live like that. Uncle Kitch and Aunt Lorna offered them the overseer’s house on Isonville, and in their desperation they almost accepted. Anna has been with an archivist all day, collecting information for her history of Pandowie. She decides to call in on Meg and Rebecca. It’s a three hour drive to Pandowie and she needs a coffee boost. A relaxing coffee, she says, when Meg opens the door. But it’s not a relaxing coffee. Becky’s in a faintly agitated, probing, questing mood today, inflecting her conversation in the form of questions, as though she’s seeking to settle some ghosts: Mum, I remember how gloomy it got after Michael was killed. It’s a wonder you and Dad didn’t separate. A lot of people would have. I remember I badly wanted you to have another kid. It’s also amazing we stayed on in the schoolhouse, given that Wesley Showalter, our bête noir, lived just across the way from us. Anna can feel herself shutting down. She doesn’t feel quite ready, quite able. She wants to say: Give me some time. She sidesteps, says goodbye, makes her way out to the car. When she retires, Anna will scratch about for a way of signing off from the Chronicle: I’ve trodden on a few toes, ruffled a few feathers, but only because I felt so passionate about the district and the people. It’s my heartland, after all, and I intend to return as often as I can. Scratch that. Start again. In the end, Anna will not write a final column. Her name will simply disappear between one issue of the Chronicle and the next. At her place on the coast she will walk the shallows, attend to her memories, share banana splits with her granddaughter.

  Friendship

  Anna’s mother had been friendly with the Showalter boys, Wesley and Rex. There is a photograph of her with Kitchener and the Showalter boys sitting in a sulky, an old painted horse sniffing the dirt. One Showalter was stitched with cannon fire in the skies over Germany and the other grew into a glossy, twice-married ugly drinker and household name. She’d also assumed that her brother was her friend: So how could Kitch connive at driving me out of my home? Anna’s first real friend was Maxine, from the town. But Maxine’s father was the stationmaster, she lived in a simple railways cottage, and the big house at Isonville always seemed to deflate and subdue her. Desperately Anna entertained Maxine, but Maxine remained flat, small and precise at the table, incapable of conjuring the sheepyards, the sheds and Ison’s creek into a place shimmering with promise—then at school on Mondays she’d behave as though the weekend had never happened. Maxine got her nerve back when the Tolleys were forced to move to the smaller, plainer, foursquare farmhouse on the six-forty acres. That house reduced Anna to a manageable size, and the fretting salt-damp walls indicated a degree of poverty and strife. Maxine was also older now, with a steady head on her shoulders. So steady that Anna felt left behind. All Anna wanted was to muck around through the years, as though she—born of an Ison—should not be obliged to plan or calculate or think past tomorrow, but Maxine knew that her only hope lay in a skill learned, a job, a marriage and children. Maxine shrugged off Latin, mathematics, the sciences. Even her body changed. She grew calm, unhurried, somehow taller, always half-smiling pleasantly, the secret of life behind it. Anna responded by becoming ratty. Her intimates now were boys, and then only for as long as it took for her to milk them dry under the cover of darkness and a tartan rug. She still wrote to her penfriend in Leeds but she did not call that a friendship. There was nobody warm, flooding or unselfish in her life. Then Lockie came along. He stayed and he stayed and he stayed. He actually liked talking to her. Was it that he knew nothing about her past—and she could not believe that—or that he knew but did not care? He loosened her tongue. She sprawled in his utility, lazy-lidded, lips swollen, a flush on her breasts that she loved and rued and was helpless to control, her spine accommodating the worn springs and cracked upholstery as if she were a dozy cat, feeling more alive than she could remember. What came first, the tingling or the friendship? Did she tingle only because he was also her friend? She also admired his uncomplicated friendship, an attraction of opposites, with Chester Flood, the orphan boy. To Lockie, everything was a huge joke. He was full of constant cheery exertions and would live forever. Chester was smarter, quieter, more subversive, laying the groundwork for his life. The three of them became friends. But then Anna went away to study and small serpents slipped into the garden. Anna began to change, going about with a frown of fury and concentration and a heart that threatened to burst. Soon Chester refused to drive down with Lockie to visit her at the college. Their arguing distressed him and he was not interested in the war. They’d become mismatched, Anna and the boys from home, their concerns were different. But, shortly after that, Anna befriended a woman in her dance class who also cared nothing about the war. Am I being inconsistent? Anna asked herself. Perhaps my attachment to Connie works because there is no history to trip us up and nothing at stake between us? What is right, and what is wrong? She burned with these questions. And Connie was unsound in fundamental ways. Connie took her to Hindley Street pubs after dance classes, advised her to dab rosewater or sugar water on her nipples, made her laugh unsoundly. The next thing Anna knew, Connie was stripping for the R and R boys in a Kings Cross nightclub: Don’t wish you were here, said her one cheery postcard. When Anna next saw Chester, seven years had passed, but she fell easily into an old wisecracking affinity with him. Quick wits and risk-taking had bought him money and influence. Got any cash to invest? Me? Anna laughed. My husband has fallen out with his father, we’re renting that old schoolhouse out near the Park, and I’m working two days a week for Carl Hartwig at the Chronicle. No chance. She looked at him, scarcely breathing. She needed some love, luck and whirling joy in her life. Surely Chester brimmed over with good luck—how else could he have escaped the call-up, escaped an untimely death, which Lockie’s had been? She needed him inside her. As it happened, they made love only once, in April, when the roads were dust-choked and shuddery and Anna had gone straight to him from the Showalter Par
k field day, wearing a shapely, flawless summer dress that she wanted him to feast his eyes upon for a moment before he stripped it from her body. She saw him again after the accident, and even though nothing was said, it was clear that they would not be lovers again. But they were friends for life. Chester was her friend at a time when many people were wary of friendship with her. Anna could not forget that, not even when he took one risk too many with the twenty thousand she inherited when her father died. The Public Prosecutor, the judge and jury, the hungry press, all said that he was a crook. Anna makes no such judgement. She visits him at the prison once a month, kisses him on the lips, holds his hand. She has come to believe that sexual attraction is an element in all friendships. She feels it with Maxine sometimes. There has always been a passionate edge to their friendship. The period when they fell out had been like an inflexible stand-off between quarrelling lovers, solved by Anna’s capitulation: Dear Maxine, I’m writing to ask if we could be friends again. There are times—when Maxine bubbles over with laughter or a secret, when her breasts are soft and her lips mobile, damp and blooming—that unsettle Anna. She can imagine being naked and unwithholding with Maxine. She knows that Maxine knows it. Maxine blushes, tosses back her head, oddly pleased. Most of the men whom Anna knows would say that their best friends are their wives. No wonder they are so often left high and dry. How must it be for Hugo, who has never married? Am I his best friend? Is our mother? In a community organised around the notion of couples, a single man is unlikely to be invited to dinner, no matter how many dinner parties he himself might hold. A man alone upsets the balance. There must be something wrong with him. If he has to be invited, then a single woman will have to be invited. Doubts, then suspicion, lodge in the orderly mind contemplating the unmarried man. Poor Hugo. Anna will be friends with Rebecca and Meg, attending concerts and often dining with them, but there will be things that the younger women won’t share with her. Anna won’t need many friends in her place beside the sea. Fewer friends but deeper friendships, old men and women looking out for one another.