When Colts Ran (20 page)

Fred stepped to the edge and looked down. In a clearing out from the overhang appeared the party of riders, men and women, with Normie Powell moving among them, talking. There was shouting – maybe a conflict brewing – but there was laughter. Fred made his way slowly a bit higher, to get a better look and check out routes as best he could, being careful to be sure he could work his way back to the ledge again. His legs were going nervous on him, beginning to shake. Everything vertical had gone vertical beyond belief. Diagonally higher, the Sydney Rockclimbers were stopped in their progress, belting in expansion bolts with ringing blows. Was Fred expected to go up there? He next heard cheering from below. Faces all looking up. At him? It was likely if he made it so, so he posed, King Kong – X of clammy fur at right-angle to the up.

‘Catch!' someone yelled.

Fred looked up and saw a face far above and an arm holding a coil of rope. Catch pronounced
kotch
.

A cascade of nylon came whipping down. The Sydney Rockclimbers peered across from their neighbouring pitches where they were busy copyrighting their names in slow motion.

The rope floated uncoiling until it speeded dramatically and struck Fred's ledge like a whip, doubled, tripled, quadrupled, pouring into a pile on the flat stones at his feet. Then, way above, a figure stepped out into the void and came abseiling down, bounding, cursing, talking to itself – yodelling the descent, stopping every now and again to wrench at bushes hurled away over a shoulder.

‘Filthy Cooper,' he named himself, or seemed to, as he landed. Wolfie Keuper: he wore boots like blocks of brown wood, bristling long socks up to his knees and leather half-trousers held up by braces, a checked shirt and a Tyrolean hat. He had a pencil-thin moustache and eyeballs like black beads that stared at Fred as if he wanted to destroy him. ‘Bloody Aussies,' he challenged, with flecks of white foam on his lips.

A wedge-tailed eagle soared, eyeing the crawling humans.

The sound was like the beating of a lumpy carpet or a coarse pillowcase, a whooshing, swiping, dragging flutter of calico against threads and hard knots. The wrist action was somehow sportslike, a golf stroke by a lone player meeting with clumsy rebuttals all the time, coming up hard against the stalks and needles and woody stems of acacia and hakea, banksia and bottlebrush and whatever else lived in suspension in the semi-sky of the Isabel Walls.

Fred, lashed to a rock, belayed Claude from above, adjusting slack while Claude did work for the camera. If Claude fell he'd be safe thanks to Fred. On a higher ledge Chook Hovell held Fred in turn. Major Gideon Pugh called Erica a tasty bit of cheese. Erica, whooping with laughter, was swung aloft in a bosun's chair to show the cameramen it was easy. A sprite of a girl could do it. Spring into the empty air and propel herself along the cliff-edge by the toes. This was the party now. A great success with Claude away on his new career.

Into Claude's calico specimen bag fell spirals of wiry blossom, gingery streaks of pollen and sticky extrusions taken from beaten plant-life, where insects dwelt at this time of day, on this particular slab of cliff: a selection of creeping, crawling, buzzing, fluttering specks enlarged for the small screen as the hefty Arriflex whirred. Flitch sweated and held the camera grip to his shoulder. Claude put his nose in the bag, grazed his eyes over the haul. When he turned the bag inside-out over a fist and sucked on the tube – the ‘pooter' – whisking selections into the capturing chamber, he was the wickedly intelligent boy outclassing his classmates in a town too small for his brain. ‘This is me,' he seemed to say. ‘It's what I do. And I've only just started.'

The horseriders far below, far from raving, greeted Claude and Normie as prodigal sons of the soil. They watched through pocket binoculars the camera pair being lowered to change film and batteries. Then the whole universe seemed activated, magnetised as the hum of an aircraft was heard; and an ugly low-winged monoplane with a narrow, high cockpit emerged between hills and plugged along the cliff-line throttled back with its wingflaps lowered like dunny doors. The pilot waved. Suspended in lazy time he hung there intent on an object, on a moving fleck on the Walls, on a person, on Erica – dusty-gold girl in a green T-shirt and shorts,
fresh as a blossoming gumnut flower
, thought Fred, sourly, as the pilot backfired the agricultural Auster in a firecracker sequence, pinning her to admiring echoes.

‘Oh, dear God,' said Erica. ‘Dalrymple.'

‘Who?' said Fred.

‘Gilbert Dalrymple,' said Claude.

‘There's never excitement like this in a town unless Shakespeare for Schools gets the call,' said Fred, wrenching attention onto himself. ‘Then it's Gertie get your pants off.'

‘The old town was never a hotbed of wild ideas,' said Claude. ‘My old man and a schoolteacher, Jack Slim, were on the outer and proud of it. Old man Dalrymple was a nut case. My father, the level-crossing keeper, was the hammer, the sickle of intellectual Bolshevism was Slim.'

‘
Jack
Slim?' said Fred. The name had mythical overtones.

‘My best friend was Eddie Slim, the son, we had a wake the night Stalin died, smoked ourselves silly, saw things we shouldn't have. I cheated for Slim in exams, wrote up his formulas. He's gone on to geology, I suppose it's not that hard.'

They joined Chook Hovell who used army binoculars on the bunch way below.

‘Who is that one?' he said from his perch on the next ledge up.

‘Which one?'

‘The bloke on the grey, ten o'clock from the woman in the red scarf.'

Claude said, ‘It's Edwina Knox in the scarf, the dowager queen. Next to her's Tim, her youngest, who's Normie's mate. On the grey? That's Kingsley Colts, the referee when Normie's father was made a quad.'

‘A damaging sort of a bloke, then,' said Hovell. Not a question, more a pronouncement.

‘He's the last one anyone blames,' said Claude.

‘Kingsley Colts,' said Fred. ‘Good name for a man on a horse. He should wear a crown.'

‘Colts,' said Hovell with a tight, sick smile. He put his binoculars away and noisily cleared his throat. He tilted his head and gave it a couple of hard shakes until his jaw gave a click.

Fred watched him from the side.

You are the strangest-faced, freakiest old scarecrow I've ever had the pleasure of looking at
, thought Fred.

A little later Fred found himself alone with Hovell, their backs to the rock wall and their knees pulled tight to their chins.

‘Architecture,' said Hovell, with a gift of encouragement in his voice. ‘Tell me about your architecture, Fred.'

Fred found himself spilling it out.

One day, he improvises – leaping over the obstacles of Central Railway workdays and a non-existent university degree, and indeed leaping over his acting hopes and what they might mean – one day he won't do any designing at all, just lead clients to rock shelters and give them an etiquette for sewage control. Let them feel the wind curve around the bones of their foreheads – the first verandah. Let them pound a stone – the first kitchen. When Fred talks this way he gets a nod of understanding. He remembers, he says, his childhood. It was all up trees and chimney-like crevices. Architecture and the tree. The cave. The shelter. ‘The world is a house,' Fred declares.

‘Well put,' says Hovell. ‘But a troubled house.'

‘I'm one of the lucky ones,' Fred blurts. ‘Our house had forty rooms, each with a numbered door, cooks, waiters, maids with brooms and a yardman with an old Ford truck loaded with beer barrels that I got to ride round the town before I could practically walk.'

‘You're still a big kid?'

Fred laughs. For sure. But he doesn't mean that. He just means lucky. Hovell draws it out of him. Because why Fred should be lucky or say he's lucky beats him. Just when he's had his heart hammered, squared off and packed down under a billion tons of sedimentary rock. Just when he's turned twenty-five, his quarter century (ye gods) of non-achievement.

Without quite realising how it was done, except in a kind of daytime dream, Fred finds himself three hundred feet up, at the pinnacle of the Isabel Walls, where climbers are able to step off onto somewhat flat ground. It is a geographical surprise up there. A lost kingdom. Fred likens it to getting to the top of a steep escalator and gliding off onto a lumpy level floor, with a low forest of scattered white-trunked gum trees and a rutted two-wheeled track running through. Here is Wolfie Keuper's Kombi Van in a glade. Here the Isabel Walls lean their praying hands on the cheek of the rusting Buddha, Mt Knox, a head of dry grass and scattered sub-alpine mallees.

One by one, the others arrive. Fred props his satchel against a tree and reclines in the shade, looking out for Erica.

Normie's boots tom-tom an old log bridge soil-covered after years, with gaps showing a clear stream running underneath. ‘Water!' yells Normie Powell.

All the elements of Normie's world are at hand – sustenance at the root and out to the tip the motto. Happiness, he remembers, climbed from water where it found its time to live in arduous circumstances. Urey and Miller had shown it in 1952. Look them up, he has no time to tell you. Normie himself saw, eleven years later, in a river swimming hole, a space where solid matter slid into air, and water diverted to earth creating life: where a done man breathed and splashed. Normie and Chook Hovell converse animatedly, then Claude cries, ‘Action!' and Normie turns to the camera and explains interconnectedness to which he gives the name ecology. The acting is bad, the technique could be improved. Normie is awful, Claude is better, but Normie is the great teacher now.

And again, it is Fred who knows all this. Sees Chook Hovell taking in the words while Gideon Pugh looks bad-tempered, kneeling, sorting through ironmongery and ropes. It appears that Pugh had words with Erica; he wants her, like a toad wants a juicy bug. He might put an ice axe through her if she spurns him. She will need protection. How does Fred know this? Doesn't have to be told. Clumping, ordinary old Fred with his mental flashes. Or so he casts himself, hero of the hour, bearer and preventer of lusts bedevilling a woman he'll love until he dies, but in all probability never have.

Claude Bonney, Chook Hovell, Normie Powell and Gideon Pugh slither around the bridge and slide down a peaty mass of wet roots. At their feet is a gravelly ledge where clear spring water spills into a bowl of rock. They gulp down water. It is hot now in the midafternoon. Erica stripes a hand up through her hair, dippers cool water behind her ears and feels a pair of eyes on her neck. Must wonder lightly if it's any one of them, but no, it's Fred. She's a little away from the rest. He's holding wattle blossom and presents a sprig with a gruff line: ‘Churl, upon thy eyes I throw all the power this charm doth owe.'

‘Act two, scene two. Beautiful,' she twirls the blossom, then hands it back to him. ‘But I'm just a bit allergic to this stuff.'

‘You seem like one of those people who studied a play once. Carved it up in sections.' Fred parks the offering in a bush. ‘Layered it into yourself. And never forgot.'

‘My Intermediate year,' she nods. ‘Correspondence school in a kangaroo shooter's caravan at Byrock. Just me and my dad, Silvio.'

‘It can't have been all that long ago,' Fred tries a little harder.

Claude, on his knees, intones for the camera, ‘This is just great!
Drosera peltata
– don't step on it.'

The others are drinking their fill and don't even think about what he means – a swathe of glistening sundews higher up the bank, light catching on their sticky insect-trapping tentacles. Flitch says Claude's continuity is up shit creek.

‘Well, fuck continuity,' says Claude.

‘You can't do that,' says Fred, looking over Flitch's shoulder. Fred is a film festival habitué and director manqué. He's everything and nothing in all of his contexts.

Erica sits rubbing her knees – they have begun to ache on the climb – and watches Fred ripping into a tin of sardines. Churl indeed. Now he's made that swipe she can't take her eyes from him, the way when crossing an open paddock she keeps eye contact with the bull. Sullen-eyed, Pugh has backed off.

‘Anyone want some?' Fred's arm goes back, he's about to fling the empty away. Then shamefacedly he crushes the can under his boots, wraps it in newspaper and drops it back into his pack. It wasn't even his. It came from the communal haul. Tonight he'll burn, bash and bury. This for Erica's sake. A fiery sanction to a bushland queen.

‘I've tried explaining to Silvio, my dad, what Claude and Normie do, how it's important and worthwhile, but he can't understand it. Not when it's not about survival the way he understands survival. Why do they have to go all those places and find the little kangaroos? He can give them all the big roos they want.'

Fred leans back, pulls his hat over his eyes and takes a five-minute smoko. After an interval of resistance a woman finds herself open to persuasion, and why not? Because it happens. Blink awake Erica Molinari and be in love.

Claude and Normie carry on that everything hasn't been got the first go. It'll be another day tomorrow. Flitch is exhausted, exasperated, and it falls to Fred to explain the need for close-ups and cutaways a little more carefully to Claude, who until he learns to use a movie camera will obstinately hold that a movie gets made by the simple expedient of sweeping the lens like a fire hose back and forth over whatever is being looked at.

Down they go abseiling to the bottom of the cliffs again to get ready for another try. Again, it's Fred with his rehearsed wisdom who shines light into the day. Trees, rocks, pathways – beams of sunlight blessing them like pilgrims – flats of lomandra awaiting a bushfire's torch, a flash of a rust-pelted animal – dingo? The tracks say yes, but nobody believes the evidence of their eyes. Something has torn open the sack hanging in a tree holding perishables. Maybe a brown dog run loose from a bush camp and genetically turned back to something finer. Too wonderful to be true if so.