been confronted with 'a big brown fellow' who had 'a brush-tail as thick as your arm'.
'No,' said Molly, putting down her lamington and holding her hands tightly together.
'And cocky as all get out,' I said. 'Sat there like Jacky and wouldn't budge.'
'You don't say.'
'In clear daylight.' I saw the possum with complete clarity as it came to take its position, the position Phoebe had occupied in the dazzling moment when she appeared on the top of the ridge.
'And wouldn't go away?' Molly shivered.
'No harm,' I said, but I was surprised to see goose-flesh on my hostess's arms.
'I live in terror,' she said, leaning forward and shifting in her chair a little so that her dimpled knee almost touched me. There was hardly room for a piece of French toast to slide through the space between our knees. She meant nothing untoward. She was merely moving closer to seek the protection of a man, an instinctive move she was not even aware of having made.
'In terror?' I asked as she put her hand on my arm.
'In terror. Do you know,' and she widened her eyes accordingly, 'a very good friend of mine, a dear lady, very sweet, was in a house, her house, when a possum', she held her white throat with a hand where Jack's gifts glittered expensively, 'came down the chimney and quite destroyed…' she waved her hand around the room, 'everything.'
'Surely not.' I discreetly separated my penis from the spot where it had glued to my woollen underpants.
Molly blinked and drank her tea.
Phoebe appeared silently in the doorway.
'I was telling your mother, Miss McGrath,' I said, 'that I have seen possums on the roof.'
'Oh,' Phoebe said disdainfully, 'really?'
'You be polite to Mr Badgery when he speaks to you, my girl.'
'Frankly,' Phoebe said, her cheeks flushed, coming to address her mother with dangerous green eyes. 'Frankly, I think he's lying-' I took refuge in a lamington.
'What was it like?' she asked.
I swallowed the cake. My throat was dry. I needed tea to wash it down. 'A big old fellow,' I said, 'a brush- tail.'
'That seems an unlikely story, Mr Badgery,' she said coolly. I held my half-eaten lamington between gluey fingers and hoped she would sit down before her mother saw the patch of blood on the back of her dress.
'No,' I said. 'I assure you. Your mother has heard it, just a minute ago.'
'That was me,' Phoebe said wickedly. 'I ran all over the roof.'
'Phoebe,' Molly said. 'Don't tell fibs.'
'I must say, Mr Badgery,' Phoebe smiled at me, 'all that exercise has given me an appetite.'
She sat down, at last.
My muscles slowly untensed and let me enjoy the splendid vision of my beloved who happily ate her lamington in the deep shadow of the parlour while the windows were filled with blue sky and the air with the white cries of seagulls.
30
In his cups Jack McGrath confessed to me that he had no affection for the Western District of Victoria. It filled him with melancholy: those great plains of wheat and sheep, those bland landscapes perfectly matched to the forlorn cries of crows. He did not care for the towns: Colac, Terang, flat sprawling places where Arctic winds cut you to the bone in winter. The cockies, he claimed, got a look in their eyes that came from staring at such uneventful horizons; but perhaps the look was in his eyes, not theirs.
As Jack McGrath motored out of Geelong in his Hispano Suiza there were many who saw him who judged, correctly, that he was a rich man in a Collins Street suit. They could not have guessed at the store of memories he carried with him like Leichhardt in the wilderness with his vital provisions: ice crystals in the high country, smoke, sawdust, the flavour of yarns with old men with age-blotched faces, a snake of apple peel dropped into sunlight. No one watching the bullock driver's body, the city man's suit, the grand automobile, would possibly guess that he had, somehow, missed the track, taken the wrong turning and ended up in Geelong by mistake, guided by a luck that was really, if he could have admitted it, no luck at all.
The things that really pleased Jack McGrath were all in the high country of the Great Divide, two hundred miles away from wool-bound Geelong. He could still read off their names, like a Catholic does his beads: Howqua, Jamieson, Woods Point, Mount Speculation, Mount Buggery, Mount Despair, The Razorback, The Governors, Mount Matlock. And whenever, in the middle of his bright electric nights, he wanted a peaceful place to rest his mind he shut his eyes and found a place on the ridge between Mount Buller and Mount Stirling, on the way down to the King Valley; there was a place there called Grassy Knoll and he could still, day-dreaming, sit there and feel the cold air in his lungs and let his mind float across the deep valleys to where the Razorback Ridge showed its clear sharp edge against the pale blue evening sky.
He had never meant to become rich. He had never planned anything. He had trusted his life and let it carry him along never expecting it to mislead him. He could not acknowledge that it had. And although depression often enfolded him as he sat alone in an armchair he could not, would not, admit that he was unhappy. He built brick walls. He placed sheets of glass above the door. He laced his home with electricity and thumped across its polished floors in heavy boots.
His father had been a bullock driver; Jack McGrath did the same. He had a talent for it, a sympathy with the beasts that got them moving when other drivers whipped and swore and tangled themselves in hot confusion. By the time he was sixteen he was entrusted with old Dinny O'Hara's best teams and he worked the long rutted miles between Melbourne and Mansfield, a broad young man with a full beard who soon became famous for two unlikely qualities: he used none of the profanities for which bullock drivers were renowned, and he was a teetotaller.
It was March and the shearers were on strike and if everyone in Melbourne and the bush knew about it, if they imagined gangs of shearers were burning down wool sheds and setting fire to the squatters' paddocks, it was news to Jack McGrath who travelled innocently beside his team in his faded red shirt, his moleskins, bowyangs, and heavy boots. He did not read the newspapers. He did not sit drinking around the campfire, telling yarns or singing songs.
When he found out he did not even know what a strike was and it was Dinny O'Hara who had to explain it to him. O'Hara was a huge man, withered with age, whose enormous cauliflower ears dominated his blotchy face.
'The shearers is on strike,' he spat.
'What's a strike, Mr O'Hara?'
'A strike is when the buggers won't work,' he spat again. 'So we got no wool to carry. The Fergusons got no wool. The Rosses got no wool. The McCorkells got no wool. It's all on the sheep, not in the bale, and there'll be bloody war before there is.'
They sat on the back veranda. Jack McGrath stared at Dinny O'Hara. He had never heard of such a thing. 'A war.'
'A war, a bloody war, that's what they want', O'Hara said, 'and that's what they'll get. Boozers and bushrangers', he said, 'galloping around with their guns and their speeches. So I'm giving you the sack.'
Jack didn't say anything. He remembered breaking a gum twig in half and then in half again. He threw the pieces of broken twig on the ground. He could not understand the justice of it. He was so used to being liked by men. His eyes were suddenly, surprisingly, wet with tears and he turned his head into the shade of the veranda on the pretext of finding something amiss with his kangaroo-hide belt.
'I hear tell,' O'Hara said, 'there's a fella in Point's Point with a team doing work with the timber. His driver got kilt, run over by his own wheel, the silly bugger.'
They didn't shake hands. Young Jack McGrath rolled his swag and started walking the sixty miles to Point's Point. He walked through the bush all night and all the next day. He sang hymns as he walked, not because he was deeply religious, but because they were the only songs he knew. He walked for twenty-four hours and stopped,
