his chalk plume of dust. They ate porridge with golden syrup, fresh soda bread with plum jam and cocoa made from new cow's milk. Charles saw a little lump of snake's shit and kicked it under the table.
There was no talking during the eating although Les Chaffey took out his wooden-handled pocket knife and, very carefully, cut the weather map from his two-day-old copy of theArgus. He placed this on the table where his bread and butter plate should have been; then he put on his spectacles so he could study while he ate.
When breakfast was finished and the table cleared, Mrs Chaffey ripped a big rag from an old floral dress and gave it to her husband. Charles heard the rip but did not think about it. He was still seated in his chair, his head back, his eyes patiently combing the cobwebby rafters, looking for his snakes.
Chaffey had to ask his guest to move. Mrs Chaffey invited him (wordlessly) to stand beside her and watch Mr Chaffey wipe down the oilskin. Mr Chaffey did not do this like a husband performing a chore, nor did Mrs Chaffey watch him as if he were.
Mrs Chaffey smiled at Charles. Mr Chaffey spat on the rag and worked on the hardened gravy spots. He rubbed like a demon. He polished the oilcloth as if it were made of first-quality cedar. He felt the surface with the flat of his hand and was not easily satisfied.
When he was done with spitting and rubbing, he tucked the rag in his back pocket from whence it hung like a bedraggled bantam's tail. Unconscious of the comic effect, he took down his dictionary from the shelf, opened it at the beginning, and removed his collection of yellowed newspaper weather maps. He then spread these on the table like a hand of patience.
'Come here, Chas. I'll show you something.'
Mrs Chaffey nodded encouragingly, although she herself remained leaning against the open window.
Charles went and stood beside his host but because he was confused as to what was happening he did not listen properly to the first part of the explanation and thus found himself saying 'yes, yes' when he was, in reality, totally bamboozled.
Les Chaffey was explaining the weather to him. He was doing it in terms of a game of snooker. There was rain coming. It was there, sure as chooks have chickens. It was not on the map yet, but it would be. There was a high, there, which would be snookered. It would wish to move across, but would be blocked. Then this low would come in and drop, plop, into the pocket in the Great Australian Bight. This itself would not bring rain, but it left the field wide open, any mug could see it, for this one, here. Les called it the 'Salient Low'.
When he had finished his explanation, Les put away his maps. Charles did not understand the implications of what he had heard until later when he went out to the shed and found Chaffey furiously welding the cleat on to his tractor. Mrs Chaffey had an oilcan and was going over the spring-loaded tines of the 'Chaffey Patented No.4 Plough'.
No one said to him, 'Excuse us, but your motor cycle will have to wait.'
Rather, Chaffey said: 'Here, pull this,' when he could not get the tractor linkage to line up with the plough.
Often, during the next two weeks, Charles came to the brink of asking about when his motor cycle might be ready, but he could see the time was not right, that Chaffey was too tired, or too busy, and so he waited, working the tractor himself for the last three hours of every day. Using the ingenious Chaffey plough, they did the rocky paddock and the one full of stumps. The tractor leapt and thumped and reared and left Charles's kidneys in as painful a state as when he arrived. At night he dreamed of furrows and his sleep was tense with the problems of keeping them straight on rocky ground.
Finally the clouds began to arrive, jumbled and panicked like bellowing beasts in a sale-yard, and Les Chaffey drove before the coming storm, seeding at last. He drove recklessly along the steeper banks in high gear, looking behind him at the bunching clouds, ahead of him for any hole or stump that might send him rolling. He had seeded the Long Adams and the Boggy Third and was on the last run of the Stumpy Thin when the rain came in great fat drops which brought out the perfumes in the soil. He finished the run in a flood of lovely aromas (minty dust, musky clay), drove out the gate, parked the tractor by the back door, put a rusty jam tin over the exhaust stack to keep out the damp, and went into the house where his wife and guest, woken from their naps by the din of rain on the roof, were celebrating with a pot of tea.
'Now,' Les Chaffey said, 'now young fellow-me-lad, we can get stuck into that AJS of yours.'
The next morning there was water for baths and for washing clothes. Mrs Chaffey laboured over the copper, stirring the clothes with a big pale stick, while the rain continued to fall. It was good rain, gentle and persistent, and Les's unlaced boots, as they returned to the house from the shed, were caked with gritty red mud. He took off his boots and left them on the back porch. He came into the kitchen where his prisoner was watching flies fucking on the table.
'There's nothing to it,' he announced, filling the kettle recklessly with water. 'Half a day's work, and I've got it beat.'
Charles was so elated he came and shook his host's hand. The mice were busy dying of their own plague. His snakes had all escaped. There was nothing to keep him in the Mallee any more, and he had resolved to return to Sydney to open a pet shop. He did not know that Les Chaffey was afflicted by a disease common in clever men: he was impatient with detail and when he had finally worked out the gearbox and seen how quickly the rest of the machine could be put together, that the problem was licked, the cat skun, etc., he no longer had any incentive to complete the job, with the result that the motor cycle would be left to lie beneath a tarpaulin like a body in a morgue and only bereaved Charles would bother to lift it, although he no longer hoped that a miracle had been performed while he slept.
Every night Les Chaffey would promise to fix the motor cycle tomorrow, but when tomorrow came he would rise late, dawdle over breakfast, perhaps go into Jeparit to the rifle club, come home after lunch, and fall asleep while his wife shook her head or clicked her tongue.
'Tell him stories about your family,' she implored the prisoner, while they sat over empty cups of tea, weeded the vegetable garden, stirred the copper or pegged clothes on the line.
'I tried, missus. You heard me. He's not interested.' Charles, in spite of his good nature, was becoming irritated with Mrs Chaffey. He thought she should say something to her husband. Instead she put the onus on him.
'Tell him something mechanical,' she said.
Charles tried to relate the story of his father's aeroplanes but being unable to answer such simple questions as the type of engine that powered them, he soon lost his host's attention and (unfairly, he thought) his hostess's respect.
All Charles's stories were like matches struck in a draught, and when he had exhausted his box and Les Chaffey's enthusiasms remained unkindled, he despaired of ever seeing his motor cycle in one piece again.
He told Marjorie Chaffey that he didn't mind, but this was false generosity intended to regain her affection. The truth was that he was so angry he could have burnt the shed down.
Easter came and went. The weather turned clear and cold. The wheat showed green above the yellow paddocks and whatever Les Chaffey should have been doing, he didn't do it. He snored, or listened to his Tommy Dorsey record, or brooded over an old Melbourne telephone directory.
And Mrs Chaffey began to act as if even this was Charles's fault. It was cold on the back veranda, but she pretended she had no extra blankets to give him. She no longer offered to wash his shirt. She spoke to him less often, and less kindly. In the afternoons she withdrew to the front veranda, darning socks or shelling peas in the winter sunlight, or squatting on her haunches to watch for something that never came. In the evenings she knitted mittens and scarves for her children in Geelong. When slugs got into the vegetable garden she spoke as if it was his fault. There was never any pudding at night. And when Charles offered his only money -a florin and two pennies – towards his keep, his wan hostess enraged him by accepting it – she dropped the coins into the pocket of her grubby pinafore where they stayed (he heard them) for weeks.
When he lay in bed at night he wore his socks and his shirt and he spread his suit across the top of the blanket. He learned to sleep on his back, very still, so that he would not crush his suit and have to borrow the iron again.
He could hear the Chaffeys talking on the other side of the wall, and he did not need to poke his hearing aid through the convenient hole in the hessian lining to understand that it was he who was the subject of their conversation.
'Fix his bike.'
