When Colts Ran (21 page)

And on that score take a long smooth wall of stained granite the Sydney Rockclimbers have moved their camp under – it must be twenty feet high, set out from the great cliff-line from where it fell, eons ago, with gnarled snow gums and strange mallees fringing its out-of-reach top. Their eyes tell them it's a geological formation, but their hearts cry out, ‘It's a monastery wall!' and behind its shelter not the click of insects they hear but the hum of prayer wheels and the chant of saffron-robed monks.

That night by the camp fire Fred recites a one-man show of bushland tales: how his father, a miner, as he describes him, a famous old fart, took him camping and cooked a vomitous mix of nut meat and sweet potato. Fred would rather have starved, so tipped his plate behind bushes, coming back at his father with a wide grin.

Well, some of that is invented. Not all of it, though. The camping bit, the two of them all alone. It happened.

‘There was a tree I remember,' Fred begins, then goes vague again. To admit that a man who was a First World War survivor fathered him in a goat's old age might age him too much. Precocious wisdom's all right but not wearing an old man's trousers.

Others take up themes: one of the Sydney Rockclimbers, Jim, is Greek. Sitting in the sidestreet outside his father's Marrickville fruit shop, leaning on his schoolbag against the wall, doing homework on the footpath because it's easier than in the house, he goes on to become a lawyer.

‘I like Greeks,' says Fred.

‘How do you know any?' asks Jim.

‘Well, there's the milk bar, the fish and chips. “The Greeks”.'

‘Careful what you say.'

‘I had a Greek stepfather.'

But that is not true. Fred hardly knew his mother's man-friend with the waxed moustache.

Erica for some reason confesses her first boyfriend, who wore a three-piece suit that made her feel safe as he drove his car up a side road in Dubbo. It also made her laugh, which was her ‘downfall'. And still is, she smiles at Fred, without saying it, though Fred gets it, as if it's addressed to him uniquely, for his own sour delectation. He after all has a great sense of humour. He can be the butt of a joke. He can love and surrender his love. He can tumble in the torrent of life, appearing and disappearing in the foam.

‘Where's Fred?' chortles Jim, remembering another story he wants to tell that most appreciative of sponges.

But Fred is nowhere to be seen. Odd man out has feelings.

They are fuzzy from the pleasure of drinking wine under the stars, good wine cooled in the spring, firelight reflected in a bright circle against the black, owl-hooting, animal-crashing night. The camera team has bush-bashed and then driven into the Five Alls for cold beers on a clean-wiped bar and the promise of a feather bed.

Fred stands out beyond the ring of fire and pursues the fingernail moon. She loves me, she loves me not. Time to cast the die, except an imponderably weepy part of himself knows the die is already cast. For the last half hour he's been crassly positioning himself so that when Erica chooses between him and Claude – he has the shabby dream of a partner-switch – she'll find his shoulder handy to lean her sleeping head upon. Some quest.

It leads him to the base of a vast old tree. There is a noise in the tree – a scrabble of claws.
What's going on up there
? he wonders, in those shattered branches and late-shooting eucalyptus buds? He shines the narrow beam of his torch and sees a pair of enormous eyes and a damp, pink nose – squirrel glider! Why does this fill his heart? Why does he breathe the words, ‘You've come back'?

When he returns to the camp Claude's head is in Erica's lap, and she's stroking his hair, oh so predictably sweet, and the whole damned lot of them are singing ‘Yellow Submarine'.

Conclusion: Fred is the odd man out for life. But the feeling suddenly isn't bad – quite the opposite, really, except for brushing away a tear – and Fred comes into the firelight noisily, heavily, commanding. ‘The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve. Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. This palpable gross play hath well beguil'd the heavy gait of night.'

‘Amen,' say the voices by the fire.

The next day climbing, Fred declares he's giving up acting. He's going to write a book. Architecture? Ditto for the shove. A book to draw the elements of his half-created life into a place between two covers, sewn, glued and stamped with gold lettering.

But nobody believes him and he doesn't believe it himself, because slumped by the trackside fatigued and guzzling water he gets the idea for the part he's auditioned for lately, but spurned – Estragon in
Godot
.

It's not coming. It's not going. It's a railway platform. It's a situation in the bush, under a cliff-line, in the natural way of things. That's what he knows and it makes him sit up, look around – this architecture of the world's stage. It's somewhere here in the crumbling socket of a tree. There's a tree in that play onstage throughout. God knows what it means but it's Fred's tree anyway, by which he was found just in time somehow, and yet so trustingly, when the iron tongue of midnight struck.

THIRTEEN

KINGSLEY COLTS SAT IN THE
town park smoking and staring at cracks in the concrete between his boots. It was a Saturday afternoon. Roars of hope and disappointment came from the football ground where he'd mistimed his ref's whistle and allowed two giants their moment of destruction. The event was long-remembered but nobody blamed Colts the way he blamed himself. There he sat through the one afternoon of the week when he'd lost himself in the game, and lost some part of his will or drive as a consequence.

Isabel Junction was a town of rusting metal roofs and termite-eaten verandah posts emblematic of the Australian scene. Tragedy came from shadows of clouds, wind in the hills' puffy cheeks brought it on – drive your car into a tree, fry yourself on an overhead line, drown in your bath, allow two giants their moment of destruction. The Greeks had a name for it: goat-song. You had to laugh. It might have been you next time but wasn't. If you started a grassfire when your slasher hit rocks, throwing sparks, or made some other sort of trivial error, soon rectified, you were never forgiven by Randolph Knox. In Colts's case the misdemeanour, so huge it cleft his life into before and after, was not talked about, not even by Randolph except to his cat: Vince Powell's injury in the match Colts had controlled, or rather had not controlled in the moment that counted.

Frosty with knowingness Randolph was not exempt from joining the general populace on the point. Colts was a lonely wonder, great as a statue cracked by lightning and dripping with marble tears. Randolph would always remember with a shudder of complicity that a lesser Knox cousin had struck half the blow, leaving Vince Powell paralysed. It bound him to Colts with canny possessiveness. Together they memorialised a moment of legendary life. It could never be taken away.

Shambling up the hill on his way to the game, wearing a green trilby, a red MacFarlane clan scarf and carrying a shooting stick, Randolph came to where Colts sat in Pioneers Park rolling a smoke.

They talked as if there'd been no years of sustained almost-silence. Colts licked the dry glue of the Tally-Ho with the tip of his tongue.

‘They've kicked off,' said Randolph looking down at his shoes. Then he looked up and met Colts's troubled eyes.

Colts angled his head to indicate he'd heard, and at the same time, low by his pocket, extracted a match from a matchbox with the fingers of one hand and struck a flame.

‘You're not coming?'

‘There's goats and kings,' said Colts, sucking in smoke. ‘Or have you forgotten?'

‘No need for that,' said Randolph. ‘“Kings are earth's gods, in vice their law's their will, and if Jove stray, who dares say, Jove doth ill?”'

‘Do say,' said Colts. ‘I'm impressed.' There was a long pause then. ‘Suppose I should say thanks,' he added, not quite understanding, or rather, not understanding quite what Randolph meant, except it was pretentious yet seemed to be a statement of something he ought to attach importance to, possibly respect.

There was a tour of Shakespeare for Schools that week, with Randolph sitting in the front row leading the applause for the young cast, just as he had at Stratford in the '50s when he saw Larry and Vivien, as he called the Oliviers with strained familiarity.

‘Come to the play tonight.'

‘I don't think so,' said Colts.

Randolph had seen it twice.

‘Well, then, afterwards, meet them in the Lounge Bar.'

It's forgotten the glittering comets that roared across rural skies bringing utmost sophistication and unbridled bad behaviour to country towns: a cast of men and girls in their twenties, priapic young egomaniacs playing the poet–prince and cutting a swathe through loveliness with its legs in the air.

Drinks were on Randolph as he introduced Colts to the lead, Fred Donovan, who played Richard III, Bottom and Malvolio in an anthology of scenes, and still had smudged kohl-eyes after dashing from school hall to bar. ‘He's only twenty-seven,' Randolph said. ‘Tremendously close to genius.' Later he said, ‘They're university students. He's doing architecture, final year. He holds the Lady Margaret Hovell Scholarship for Promising Design, quite a coup. They say he'll get the University Medal after a rocky start. He went to Cranbrook.'

That was a school of a better sort down the hill from their old school overlooking Sydney Harbour. During their estrangement Randolph had missed the pleasure of uniting elements of Colts's early life with the way he lived now. It was something Colts was unable to do himself, Randolph believed, a matter of laying gifts of understanding at Colts's feet, he was the sphinx of provocation.

Soon the cast went out of control with jugs of Reschs and crushed packets of crisps strewn underfoot, bare-legged girls sitting on the knees of shearers and stagehands plucking noisy guitars. Randolph was left forgotten except for his wallet. Colts saw Donovan, a stocky young man, leaning a young woman from the cast against a backstairs wall and shoving his hands up her dress.

Colts wandered out the back where timber offcuts burned in a forty-four gallon drum. The blaze lit faces. One of them was Alan Hooke's, seen dancing with that reckless girl, Barbara, to the thump of ‘Satisfaction' played from a portable gramophone on the tailgate of a ute. Most of the time Colts was numb, but here like this he could let himself go. Far older than this crowd (Hooke was barely eighteen) Colts rock-and-rolled like an ape, laughter showing his teeth. Everyone became a shadow at midnight; they mingled as one. In the mornings he'd remember little, till the return of creeping shame. Sunday mornings: Vince Powell would be sitting in the front row pew at St Aidan's, strapped to his chair with leather belts holding down his convulsions. Alan Hooke would be in the choir.

Randolph Knox was away most weekends but that hardly mattered over what he knew. See how Colts tripped from Lounge Bar to Public Bar and back again and out to the yard. Know how a clean, lean bloke fell into habits so fast he seemed since the year of Vince Powell's mauling to belong to their shape – stumbling into the night with Tub Maguire and other humans long stripped of shame around port wine and proof spirits.

Vince Powell's funeral was conducted by the bishop, attended by half the synod. Maguires came from all over the country, rolling up in old cars held together by hope and binder twine. A former ship's bosun piped the coffin home. Pamela Slim wearing black was one of the women comforting Jenny Powell. She came over from the tragic side of town: some thought The Crow had never left it, the way she appeared at the end of that street, leading to the town common, where nobody went except the garbage lorry attended by garbage men and kids who never went to school.

When the cortege arrived at the cemetery, its tail end was still crowding the herringbone brick pathways of St Aidan's. On Cemetery Hill, in sight of swimming hole and rugby field, Normie Powell came forward at a prearranged moment and kicked a football into the grave. Randolph disliked the gesture as it seemed foreign to the restraint required of custom as old as the worn earth itself: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What made it worse was it was done with a showy drop-kick, greeted by applause.

There were wakes all over the town. Total strangers cried. Colts's reprobate companions included Randolph's younger brother, Tim. Then came a bunch of Tim's friends renting a farmhouse and outbuildings along an eroded creek sixteen kilometres from town. They seemed to be part of a criminal class at the same time as they wrote their PhDs. It was a time of disintegration, disrespect, disenchantment, disaccord.

The effect of the times on Colts, as far as Randolph could tell, was to spoil his appearance. He grew his hair long. It looked like a horror show dangling around his cadaverous stock agent's skinny frame. The times were childish with their idiot games of skinny-dipping and gold-capped mushroom hunts. Acting your age was a test of character. Randolph went all out for culture in cravat and suede shoes. Ted Merrington, the scrap-metal merchant with a private school background and a noisy basso profundo, praised Randolph as a man of taste and Randolph lapped up the flattery, seating Merrington at dinner parties near the traymobile handy to the wine and advising him on livestock and land values on the Isabel.

A name worth collecting came up: Veronica Buckler.

‘You want?' said Randolph, high on gin and bitter lemon.

‘A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse, Randy.'

All was small gains, but ‘be thankful for small mercies' was Randolph's motto around the restored friendship with Colts. Summers without Colts at cricket, winters without him at rugby. This was how life was now, they were used to it. The bung-lunged cross-country athlete was gone. The sportsman Colts, the great sheep-classer Colts – protégé of Captain Oakeshott, equal of Otway Falkiner and Basil Clapham – the genial recounter of episodes in New Guinea coastwatching, had left town leaving a slurred cheerio.

The man remaining had the same name, same face, same genial consideration, same bellows-wheeze after effort. But still with that forsaken and preoccupied, faraway look a boy had on Eureka. Colts did the same work but never as peerlessly as once. You couldn't help liking him still. You called him Kings, and he was royal like that. You felt helpless to watch. He just needed a bloody haircut and the stuffing put back in him.

There were explanations, deeds, actions and amends. By the late '70s, Colts was Alan Hooke's baby daughters' childhood Uncle Kingsley. Alan had married the reckless Barbara. Colts was Tim Knox and Pepita Wolmsley's boozy, wiser older friend. They too had children. Randolph marched on Anzac Day, wearing his older brother Sandy's medals. Colts, a returned man, did not.

Colts was on Pamela Slim's visiting list after all this time. They were, though the word was not used, lovers. Still rootin' was the descriptive phrase applied to the situation.

Pamela caught the slow train down from Sydney, doing embroidery and reading hefty novels. Lost in thought she turned a page with a licked finger and looked out the window. On the historical side, reading taught her opposites combined, leaving nothing to argue about. Small towns obeyed the conventions of empires, curtains drawn between acts. Lonely sidings with eucalyptus trees and dusty roads leading out at right angles had a Chekhovian precedence: the epitome of provincial summer afternoons with their muffled couplings in tin-roofed homesteads.

Talk of an affair in past years between stock agent (‘randy as a goat') and schoolteacher's wife (‘can't get enough of it') was condensed down to the reality of the everyday. Nobody gossiped anymore on who collected whom from the train, where they went or what they did banging the headboards in Woodbox Gully till dogs along the creek bank throttled themselves barking at the end of their chains past midnight. Not even Randolph Knox.

The only one messing it up was Eddie Slim, a dream of bad conscience. Nothing explained him. His mother was at a loss. Dialectical materialism had no answers. Theology might have an answer with its talk of original sin. Ever since Eddie did over the town's milk money on a moonlit night there'd been galloping disappointment. He would be, in a novel, the spoiler returning to make an impossible gripe: con man, card sharp, petty thief, pretender to the throne. At seventeen the Institute for Industrial Psychology in Hunter Street did a test, ranking him capable. And he was. But badness was a virus undetectable in any test.

Pamela was a middle-aged woman now, thicker of figure but moving with her weight balanced like a dancer, showing grace and fine beauty in a pair of tailored slacks and a linen blouse unbuttoned at the throat. If it seemed inexplicable that she would give herself to a man like Colts, remember her themes were pity and disappointment as well as a somewhat anti-doctrinaire contrariness, hammered on the anvil of her married life. ‘A woman's natural mission was to find where she was most appreciated and the point was to find out where that was' – this from another of her hefty novels. Well, she had tried.

‘Shine a light into yourself,' she'd said to Colts, on more than one occasion doing his thinking for him around what he needed to do, in a woman's way; but as well ask him to wield a crowbar and crack himself open or blow his brains out.

He couldn't, though he knew what she meant. Just sometimes the openings asked of a man came good, but hardly long enough to count, and life at the best of times was a camera lens jammed hardly wider than a slit. Everything that counted had happened in his early life, even before he was born. He could not be, and never would be, what he was meant to be, what he'd been told he would be when a man: Kingsley Colts, son of the late Colonel Colts, the father he'd never known, ward of such legacy as worlds were made from, to become ‘Dunc Buckler's kid'. He was a particular reason why a great war had been fought, why a continent was planted with homesteads and fenced, in opposition to desolation. But sometimes Colts woke in the mornings and took in the full gush of light. Then it was good, and the world was ready for him. He smiled, and looked at Pamela wonderingly.

She had learned what few knew: that Colts was a naturally generous man. Hard working, unambitious, helpful. With all that there was the bafflement a woman liked teasing out. She had come knocking at his door when Eddie was a boy. Jack was ill that winter and she'd sought the name of a yardman to get firewood for the classroom and school residence stoves. Colts had no idea of his own best side: within half a day he had the places stacked with logs and trucks arriving with more. He'd done all the splitting and stacking himself and Jack never had to work the woodpile again. A man was not himself unless he excelled himself. Nothing in nature was. She saw it in Colts. She heard Colts drawing raspy breath and was moved by the effort taken. When Colts placed his hand on her head, strangely like a blessing, or watched her moving around the room, picking up her sewing, or standing at the window looking at the alabaster white of frost in the yard, and he smiled at her, rather hesitantly, as in a dream intractable to understanding, she felt a great peacefulness completely irrelevant to the torment of the century (which Jack marched to) or her personal life (where her direct pain was set). Most people had to reach up in life in order to make themselves. Colts was an example of someone who'd needed to reduce or detract from himself in order to get down to what mattered in himself, the contained seed of himself always just out of reach in the soup of failure.