run off the road on the north side of the crossing and the meandering wheel marks on the saltflats had left no corresponding impression on my memory.
Rain was falling in a fine drizzle. My right shoulder was wet. The line of dwarf yellow cypress pines along Blobell's Hill was smudged by dull grey cloud and nothing else in the landscape was distinct except the particularly clear sound of a crow above the saltpans flying north towards O'Hagen's. It sounded like barbed wire.
My whole body was stiff and sore but my hands, still clamped around the wheel, were stiffer and sorer than any other part of me. The skin on my palms was torn and blistered from the axe work and had dried hard. My knuckles were bruised and broken. I felt everything that was wrong with my character in those two painful hands – the palms and knuckles always in opposition to each other.
My mouth was parched dry. My head ached. I regretted hitting the small-eared boy. I regretted wishing to put my head between Mrs O'Hagen's legs. I regretted that my actions confused people. I regretted being a big mouth, a bullshitter and a bully.
I was thirty-three years old. I turned the rear-vision mirror so that I could see my face. It teetered on the point of being old. One morning, I knew, I would look into a mirror and see rotting teeth and clouded eyes, battles not won, lies not believed.
It was then I decided to marry Phoebe.
It came to me quite simply, on the saltpans south of Balliang East. I would marry Phoebe, build the aeroplanes at Barwon Aeros, be a friend to Jack, a son to Molly.
When I stepped from the Ford I found the distance between the running board and the ground unexpectedly short. I stumbled and, stepping back, found the T Model up to its axles in the salt-crusted mud.
A crooked smile crossed my face.
'Serve you right,' I said.
The Ford had been a tumour in my life. I had fought battles with it in the way another man might fight battles with alcohol or tobacco. I had walked away from it and returned to it. I had rejected it only to embrace it passionately. I admired its construction, its appearance, the skill that had produced it so economically. And these were also the things I loathed.
So on this Tuesday morning at six thirty a. m., when I walked away from a T Model in the saltpans, I felt an enormous relief, a lightness. I was finished with Fords and the dizziness, the dryness in my throat, the pain in my hands, did not stop me appreciating the beauty of this landscape with the black motor car stranded and dying like a whale.
I walked ten miles back to Geelong. I could see myself. I saw how I walked. There, on the road: a man entering the first decent chapter of his life.
25
While we waited for the pudding, Jack discoursed on flying.
'I don't want to hear it,' Molly said, holding her small hands across her ears. 'It makes me giddy, upon my word it does. It makes me giddy and faint.'
Jack prized a hand from the side of his wife's head and placed it on his napkined lap.
'I'll fall,' she said, not daring to look down at the floor.
It was not easy to understand Molly's antics, because they were only partly a joke. She performed these girly-girly acts continually.
'You won't fall, my petal,' Jack said, 'and if you did fall, I'd catch you. And if I didn't you wouldn't get hurt – no more', he smiled, 'than a bruise on your backside, a big blue one.'
'Shush,' said Molly, colouring.
They both coloured, husband and wife. It was a dirty sight, because anyone could see that Jack's blush was not caused by embarrassment but by excitement.
'Like a map of Tasmania,' he said.
'I'm going to lie down,' she said, but must have remembered the pudding, for she sat down almost as soon as she had stood up. There was something very odd about her eyes which were flirtatious but also fearful. Of course this was a game (Jack loved it) but sometimes you could feel real terror in it. She clung to Jack as a giddy person clings to a tree on a steep mountain when everything underfoot is dry and slippery with dead gum leaves and shiny grasses. She held his hand, patted his knee, tugged his sleeve, tucked in his shirt tail, filled his glass, took lint from his shoulder.
Only puddings seemed to soothe her. She cooked them in plenty: steamed puddings with jam sauces, queen puddings with wild wavy egg-white toppings, roly-poly puddings, plum puddings out of season, apple charlottes and rhubarb pies. She had small ankles, shapely legs, delicate bones, but her body was a tribute to puddings and the bread and hot milk Phoebe made for her when she had queer feelings.
There was something definitely wrong with Molly's brain, but whatever it was she so churned up with imitations of helplessness, knowingness, self-mockery and God knows what else that it would have been easy to forget it entirely if Phoebe (silent Phoebe) had not watched over her with such a protective air.
I did not mind these frailties. I loved my new family. I was an old dog lying before an open fire, warming myself before them. I liked to see them show affection to each other.
I had shone my shoes before this dinner. I swung my legs beneath the table. I whistled. I brimmed with marriage. It radiated from my skin in heady waves like sweet-smelling gasoline, and I whistled, not even aware that I was doing it, or that my companions at the dinner table (even Phoebe) were starting to smile because of it.
Bridget, restored to the dining room, hovered with a large steamed pudding – a treacly lava of jam sauce engulfed the yellow mountain in a slow sweet flood. She tried not to giggle at the whistling guest who now gave her a broad, lewd wink. She coloured to the roots of her dark Irish hair, placed the pudding heavily in front of Jack, and fled to the kitchen for the custard.
A veil of marriage fell across the table. I watched my future father-in-law dole out the pudding in heavy country slices and could easily have got up and hugged him. My mother-in-law was busy with the custard. My bride sat pale and beautiful with her head bowed.
'I've been thinking', I said at last, 'of marriage.' My head was so full of it, it did not occur to me that they might find this news surprising.
But I was too enthusiastic to notice any puzzlement. I was carried away, and relying, as I always relied, on the heat of my enthusiasm to ignite my listeners. By these means, by the sheer force of my will, I had seduced women and talked my audiences into the air above astonished cities.
The silence did not trouble me. I did not think to liken Phoebe's pale silence to that of a prisoner staring at a judge with a black cap. I did not notice Bridget run from the room, or Molly pull in her lips on disapproving drawstrings. Jack ate in a dedicated manner, with his head down, and all that any of this meant to me was that I had not properly communicated my feelings to them.
I allowed the hot jam sauce to cool while I devoted myself to my new enthusiasm. I praised the joys of children, and contrasted married life with that of the lonely bachelor. I praised women. I placed candles in their hands and gave them credit for great wisdom. I celebrated motherhood. I pushed against the silence like an old stubborn bull who will lean hard against a fence until it falls.
'Who', asked Jack, without very much enthusiasm, 'is the lucky girl?'
'Ah,' I said, 'that would be giving the game away.'
'Is it', asked bleak Molly, 'anyone we know?'
I hesitated. The heat was leaving me and my sense of the world around me was becoming clearer. I saw I was in danger of committing a serious blunder.
'No,' I laughed, 'no one you know.' And then, in a stroke that saved me, 'No one I know either.'
They all laughed (everyone, that is, except Phoebe who carefully divided her slice of pudding into nine pieces and separated them, one from the other).
'What a man you are, Mr Badgery,' said Molly pouring on more custard.
'I see nothing so peculiar,' I said, happy to pretend that I was offended.
