When Colts Ran (16 page)

‘It's his nuts,' Fred would say, an answer he could tell delighted Buckler right down inside deep, where he couldn't ever acknowledge that it quivered. His nuts bound them: one and one and Rusty forever. It was something that Mrs Veronica Buckler could only ever think about.

At the end of one long, hot, endless day they arrived at the national capital, with its monuments – Parliament House, War Memorial, Civic Centre – held off in dry grass paddocks, separated from each other by what seemed like miles of open country, dry-grassed, and Buckler himself, to Fred's way of thinking as he aimed the Box Brownie, a monument too, truer than all of them – face twisted, bitter switching to benign, hands on hips like angled tree branches grown crooked in bad seasons but with a hopeful expression on his dusty claypan of a dial.

‘Say cheese.'

‘Cheese,' said Buckler.

‘Stand up straighter,' bossed Fred, but Buckler only propped himself the other way over. He needed to hold on to something – a cigarette, a lamp post. He was getting old.

‘Get on with it, Frank Hurley.'

When Fred collected the prints, days later, Buckler had the hunched look of an old wallaby seized in the bones from too much low browsing.

Before Canberra Fred had never thought of any man-made place on the face of the planet as coming into existence from nothing. The towns of his childhood simply were.

‘They had a good idea here,' said Buckler. ‘It was one of your Coca-Colas and his lady wife camped down on the flats that dragged us around to their thinking. They drew a picture we couldn't see ourselves. They got the one thing right in this country that brands this country like nothing else does – space. They put space into a town. There's a lot of space between everything here, and that's the idea. It's a fact if you've got space, you've got time. The old darkies knew that and lived their lives over many generations, setting off on journeys only their grandchildren or great-grandchildren would complete. It's why we've got to watch out for them. Look at all the time in the way the country's worn down. It's the air you breathe. You're part of that while you're in it. If you don't know where you are, you're standing in it.'

Buckler left Fred to himself next day. In the camping ground he made a friend, a boy his own age. The friend's sister lent him her bike, a girl's bike. The two mates spurted dust and rode away out into the country for a day. They took oranges and a paper bag of mixed lollies. They didn't even ask each other's name they were so in agreement over what boys did.

Up on a ridge was a building site, deserted, but with all the gear waiting as if the men had just walked off an hour ago. Timber shavings were fresh on the floor and the rafters, open to the sky, blood-red sap. The site was across the Federal Capital border, in New South Wales above the railway line. It was on farmland, on a rocky ridge.

There weren't any tools but there were loose nails, and a few bricks and stones. Fred started hammering nails in an upright, using a rock, and his mate with equal sweat and seriousness stood back from a cement mixer standing idle and hurled bricks into its open maw, keeping score of hits and misses.

‘What's this wall made of?'

‘
Mud
.'

They jerked their heads around and saw a man get up from under a tree where he'd been camouflaged in dappled shade, up from a card table with sheets of drawing paper held down by an ink bottle. He wore a blue-striped shirt and a bow tie, had hair flying out like Harpo Marx.

‘
Mud
, now quit that!'

They dropped what they were holding.

‘That's right, mud. Don't you like a mud house?' he said. ‘That's why you're trying to knock it down?'

‘We never meant nothin',' said Fred's new friend. ‘It's an all-right humpy if you ask me.'

‘What about you, Tub?' the man shaded his eyes and looked at Fred.

He hated that nickname – Tub, Tubby – the way it was pulled from the air. It seemed too accurate therefore cruel or funny leaving Fred no gas to breathe unless he reacted by striking a blow. He wasn't fat, it was just that sometimes he got into a way of eating, sitting around reading and thinking and daydreaming and putting on weight. Rusty liked it, he was fun to push, pinch and tickle, but she asked Mavis the cook not to feed him up so much.

‘Come on. I won't bite you. Tell me what you honestly think.'

‘Your house is a heap of crap.'

‘Come over here, Tub,' said the bloke. ‘Leave your girl's bike where it is and give me more of your infernal opinion.'

Fred hadn't looked at the house properly but now he looked. He jutted his jaw.

‘Who'd build a house like this? Rough-hewn, I'd call it, an offence to finished standards. There's no words for it.'

‘Now there's a pompous arsehole,' said the man to the other boy.

‘He's a bit like that,' said the boy, kicking the dirt with his bare feet.

The man led them round the house, which changed before their eyes as he spoke.

‘Some of my builders think like you, Tub, that they are beyond the pioneering habits of their forebears, leaving timber as it was dragged from the wilds: slabs of ironbark, pillars of yellow box still with scabs of bark on them, knotholes exposed, insect scribbles in the wood. When people left the bush it was for something better than a ramshackle proposition made of mud. Right?'

‘S'pose so,' said Fred.

‘Next thing I'll be wanting a bark roof and a dirt floor. That's what they say.'

He showed them the plans. Each huge sheet of the heavy paper had a variant number and angle of view but the same name: ‘The Friendly House.'

‘Why's it called that?' the boys asked. They'd changed in these few minutes from grubs to something better, maybe more human, even intelligent, and were at the bloke as if they'd known him a long time, and everything about him was all right. Fred thrust his hand into the lolly bag and took out teeth, the prize of the packet, and held them out to the bloke.

‘Marcus Friendly, he's either hated or loved,' said the bloke, accepting the gift and biting off a lump of molars and pink gums.

‘My father votes for him every time,' said the other boy, standing up straighter.

‘Yours, Tubby?'

‘I don't have a father,' said Fred, loyal to the unspoken pact of Buckler's part in his life and avoiding mention that Buckler hated the name Marcus Friendly and everything Friendly stood for as a Labor Party head.

‘I'm sorry to hear that. You don't have a father.'

‘Well, not really.'

‘Hmm,' said the bloke. ‘My name's Warner Tarbett.'

They gave their names. Fred's mate was Col.

‘When I first met Friendly,' said Tarbett, ‘he told me that architects were the greatest damned fool wasters of a man's time. I said you'll have to put up with me being cranky a lot and I'll fly you upside down till you learn better. I was his pilot during the war. They gave Friendly an Avro Anson and I was his Man Friday. He was like a father to me.'

‘They were the flying brick,' said Col.

‘Ansons were but I flew that brick all over the country from Tassie to Darwin and up to New Guinea. When it wasn't Friendly it was army bigwigs.'

‘It was Friendly's plane that was bodgied in Moresby in '44,' said Fred. ‘The plane's airspeed device was blocked by chewing gum, and water was found in the gasoline.' Fred stared at the architect.

The architect stared back at him. ‘That's not widely known.'

‘It was in
People
magazine.'

‘Not the chewing gum.'

‘You could work it out, anyone could,' said Fred. He felt himself turning red. You might know how a plane worked but the gum was one of Buckler's hush-hush tales from his right-wing mates who'd had sons in the forces. They were an underhand lot, disposed to dirty conduct. Buckler said so himself, yet saw their uses. Whoever did it had wanted it blamed on the Yanks. They'd used a stick of Beech-Nut gum and left the wrapper.

‘They said it must have been a Yank,' said Fred.

‘But Friendly got on with the Yanks,' said Tarbett. ‘No malice there. However . . .' he bored his eyes into Fred's skull. ‘There's a mean as acid Australian way.'

‘What's that mean, “Australian way”?'

‘The dinky-di dimwit, the dried-up mental type, son of the acidulated soil. He's a mighty fool who wears khaki like he wove it, then back home he's part of the country – oh, too right he is – right down to the twisted meaning he gives to everything. The mighty me. Yeah, that's Australian all right – a big dead gum tree dried out and hanging on for no reason.'

They went back to looking at the plans. It delighted Fred to see something emerge three-dimensional from flat – it was like seeing the house flying apart in the
The Wizard of Oz
, now coming back together.

‘Some people hear a piece of music and that's it for life,' said Tarbett. ‘Some read a poem, or see a picture, they hear talk of a certain slant, words, great words, and that's their tuning fork. What's it with you two weasels?'

Col said, ‘I like trucks.'

‘Fred?'

He couldn't say, but with him it was playing parts. Fred liked the way Tarbett was done up flash and didn't mind if he looked a galoot. He was an authentic show-off. Yet when Fred reached down into himself to say it was showing off or acting a part or making something real from nothing that he liked, he couldn't pull anything out except, ‘Dunno,' but said with just enough understanding in his look that Tarbett nodded, and changed the subject.

‘I've drawn the house down to the last nail,' he said, ‘including the doorhandles. Friendly's on the site most days looking over my shoulder. He's sick today. Marcus Friendly was born in a bark hut. He's lived in railway barracks all over the joint. The only house he's ever owned is a workingman's cottage. The last few years he's lived at the government hostel in a room where you can't swing a cat. Why does he need a house at all? Because he's sick, he's dying, and the country won't give him a bloody thing, so I'm getting what the country won't give him all together and I'm giving it to him. The tree, the mud, the rock. It's like his face, it's craggy. It's real. It's true. You're all right, Fred, I think. Col, you're solid. But you wouldn't have the bloody slightest idea what I'm talking about.'

‘We would,' they said.

‘Then put what you've got in this tin here. Every penny counts.'

They reached in their pockets, Col had a penny and Fred pulled out a pound note.

‘Jesus, sonny, that's too much,' said Tarbett.

Fred folded the note over and pushed it in.

‘Now piss off. I've got work to do,' said Tarbett.

The last part of the drive was south, a few hours on a dusty road, then a turn-off and a winding two-wheeled track getting close to the climax Buckler promised.

Fred saw nothing resembling what might be given the name cliff, bluff, precipice, boulder or whatever, whether high or low, man-made or natural, and asked Buckler for a clue telling him what to look for such as would knock the socks from his boyhood hideout. All he could see were low hills and sheep paddocks. At a turn-off they entered a forest.

‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?'

‘Ethereal.'

They came to a shuddering halt at a point where Buckler said that if they went any farther they'd fall over an edge. The Humber Super Snipe looked strange in tall, bark-peeling timber. Here they were at three or four thousand feet, surrounded by forest except for a hazy gap in the trees. Any moment a bunch of axemen would emerge and Buckler would ask what regiment they'd been in, and they'd stare at him, working him out as some sort of living ghost.

‘Look away off there, what do you see?'

‘Trees,' said Fred, searching east through the hazy gap over wild country that fell away below them, forested gullies and hills rolling into a line of distant bushfires. ‘I see the horizon, no, it's a thin dark cloud.'

‘That's the sea,' said Buckler. ‘Forty miles away as the crow flies.'

Fred took Buckler's binoculars and staggered with the weight of them. Held them to his eyes, seeing a cream of white on a reef, a long breaking wave or a boat's wake, proving it was water. He handed the binoculars back.

‘Now turn around,' said Buckler. ‘Look up.'

It was like being struck on the head by a low branch, by an obvious thought, when Fred looked up, for what he saw just made him feel stupid; it was so big and in his way the whole time. How could he have missed it? A crag, a shadow, a bulk. A great lean of knobbly dark sandstone – a cliff – it rose in a tremendous slope, vertical stacks tufted with dry grass and with whole trees growing out of chimney cracks and finally, away up, just showing as a cluster of boulders hundreds of feet above their heads, attracting wisps of cloud and soaring wedge-tailed eagles; yet somehow ending, not in the sky, not quite, not finally, but leading off to an upper world just like this one – a plateau-top of grass and trees and maybe roads, creeks and fences.

‘Looks easy,' said Fred.

‘You are a big mouth,' said Buckler.

They stuffed a knapsack with food, tightened their laces, stamped their feet, pulled their hats down over their foreheads, and started bush-bashing. It took an hour to reach the foot of the cliffs where Buckler stood watching and Fred started climbing.

That night, the last before heading up to Sydney and school, Fred was exhausted. His knees were grazed and his fingertips sore from scrabbling for handholds. But he'd gone to the top – he would always remember that, actions matched to boast; it was his way of perfection and he was finding it, with Buckler's moonface gleaming from below, urging him on. Buckler was the man who denied him nothing but withheld that admission: the definition of a father, may be, who led from behind.