1
Marjorie Chaffey laid down her broom and squatted on the sun-silvered boards of her front veranda. A mouse ran across her bare foot; when it returned to nibble at her big toe-nail she brushed it aside. She was in her middle forties and when she squatted, she squatted comfortably, with her unusually large feet flat on the sandy floor and her thin arms folded on her knees. She could stay in that position for hours, and would do so, if the mirage would come back again.
The mirage had appeared at the bottom of the driveway. It had occupied the lonely road for four hundred yards on either side of their mailbox. There, shimmering above the hot Mallee sand, she had seen the main street of Horsham. This had occurred two years ago, two days after Boxing Day. She had been able to make out the parcels in the women's string bags. She could see the butcher cutting down a string of sausages and his name (Harris) was written on his glass window. She saw an old farmer with a bent back lead a reluctant fox-terrier on a string lead. She had seen the white-aproned grocer's boy riding on a black bicycle.
This, by itself, did not have the makings of a secret. If this had been all there was, she would have fetched her husband and they would have looked at it together.
But she had seen something else, and this 'something else' had filled her with such joy, such a sweet mixture of happiness and loss, that she could tell no one. The 'something else' was a young boy, dressed in cricket whites. She had only seen him for a moment. Another boy, the grocer's boy, had leaned his black bicycle against a wall and, when he had entered his employer's premises, the bicycle had fallen noiselessly to the footpath. The farmer had been led away by his fox-terrier. And then the boy in cricket whites passed the butcher's window, did a cartwheel, and was gone.
It was the cartwheel, the slender tanned arms, the careless joy of it, that pierced her heart, for she thought she recognized -although she knew it was impossible – her husband. She knew it was not her husband. She could hear him then, could hear him now, up at the forge. His nose had grown and his eyebrows had skewed like a house whose foundations are sunk in shifting shale. And yet it was her husband and she remembered what he had been like when he was a young boy, swift and pretty as a rabbit. He had played on the wing for Jeparit and he had such a dainty, fast, brave stab kick – it fairly zinged – and she had married him for a young girl's reasons not like they said.
But now she heard a motor cycle approach and her interest shifted towards it. It was not a mirage. It was a real motor cycle, a hard metal object that was causing a soft orange feather of dust to rise into the cobalt sky behind it. Watching the motor cycle she began to forget her boy in cricket whites and, although she had no idea who rode the motor cycle, she willed it to stop.
'Stop,' she said, not loudly, but very clearly.
The motor cycle stopped. It was beside the mailbox, four hundred yards from the veranda. It stayed there, its engine beating erratically.
When the rider got off his machine, Marjorie Chaffey felt – it came on her suddenly – irritated. She stood and picked up her broom.
She would have to offer the visitor some water.
2
The motor cycle fired and misfired, hesitated, surged ahead, misfired and spluttered. Charles gritted his teeth and felt the sand between his fillings. His kidneys ached. He had tied a woollen scarf around them, then tightened his money belt around the scarf, but the bruised kidneys still ached and the cause of their pain – roads made from saplings laid side by side, a technique known locally as corduroy – showed no signs of getting any smoother.
There was nothing wrong with the motor cycle, a ten-year-old 1927 H-series AJS. The fault was with the petrol. In all this drought-stricken Mallee it was the one place a traveller could be sure of finding water.
My son was seventeen years old. He had powerful thighs and thick arms hanging low from sloping shoulders. His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand-irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.
The hearing aid was in his ear but not connected. The ear spluttered and exploded, crackled and fizzed as it always did, whether connected to the hearing aid or not. With this ear he remembered me – the grief-mad father who had struck him one awful evening at Clunes.
The new Mercury sidecar, a heavy attachment better suited to a large motorbike, proclaimed his business: 'Snake Boy Badgery' and the crudely He saw the mailbox when he was still a mile from it – a pale blue thing sitting on the sand which slowly revealed itself to be what he had known it was anyway – a four-gallon drum on its side with a small veranda soldered on to keep the weather out. A soft sandy track led from the mailbox through a stand of stunted Mallee gums and up a gentle rise to where a house – its corrugated iron walls gleaming silver in the heat – stood on a bare orange patch of earth.
Charles stopped at the mailbox and read the sign. 'Chaffey.' He was already nervous. He wondered what sort of person Chaffey would be, if he would be suspicious, or sarcastic or rude, if he had sons who would taunt him or daughters who would laugh at his funny looks, if they would refuse him water, deny him a feed, or give him both and then send him out into the dark unfriendly night without wondering if he had a bed to go to.
The gate was not made from wood or iron, was more of a trap than a gate, a strained contraption made from fencing wire and a complicated series of loops and levers that served to tension the wire and slacken it off. He had not come across the system before (not surprisingly – it was the product of Les Chaffey's ingenious mind) and so took some time to get it open and even more time to get it shut.
Marjorie Chaffey saw Charles undo his scarf and belt and place them in his sidecar. When she saw him comb his hair she thought: 'Salesman.'
It was late in March but still very hot. The wheat had long been taken in but still lay in sacks at railway sidings where it was being eaten by mice. The earth had been ploughed and seeded twice but the expensive seed had never germinated and the paddocks, the subject of mortgages and other substantial documents, were drifting like bad dreams in the wind.
Marjorie Chaffey tried to read the sign on the sidecar as it approached but she had left her distance glasses on the mantelpiece and so could not make it out.
The veranda was only two feet above the sandy soil, but it gave her the advantage over strangers and she remained there as she always did, looking down at the machine (shining black, glittering gold) which fell silent, not sharply or cleanly, but like a noisy meeting slowly brought to order.
The rider did up the buttons on his suit coat. He was, she saw, only a boy.
Charles tried to see her face, but the sun was in his eyes and the woman was in shadow. 'G'day missus.'
'G'day.' The reply was as flat as a shutter on a window.
He squinted up at her. It would be a small exaggeration to say that he sought love in the stranger's shadowed face, but none at all to say that he wished approval and acceptance. He was a stranger moving amongst strangers, finely tuned to acceptance and rejection.
'Hot enough for you?' he asked.
'Hot enough.'
He was sweating inside his heavy suit, but he wished to appear a man. He also wanted to say, I'm just a boy. I won't harm you. All I want is a feed and a place to sleep.
The woman on the veranda was as still as a goanna that knows itself watched and even the feathery touch of her broom as it shifted on the floor reminded him of a goanna's forked tongue as it smells the air.
'Boss home?' he asked her. He knew the black eye made him look unusual. He would have liked to explain the black eye to her. He was sure she was a nice woman and kind to her children. He could not explain the black eye. He was ashamed of it.
'What you after?' she asked.
'Oh,' he blushed and made an arc in the sand with his boot, 'bit of business.'
