I got into the habit of running, long-distance running, around the hair-counting period. I laced on my Dunlops and jogged the forest paths. Not for fitness, not for self-preservation. I ran to be alone. You could say I ran from Tilda.
Two hours, seven days a week, from 5 to 7pm, regardless of weather, I ran. I carried a torch for when the winter moon wasn’t working. For the record, I never saw a puma: they are the myth of simple men. But I did learn to tell dead sticks from live snakes. I learned that kangaroos don’t come when you call them, even if you hold out grass or sugar cubes.
When running, I was temporarily free of Tilda, and the touchings and the hair-counting. I was sometimes tempted to reach out and touch tree bark as I scooted by but it wasn’t until I got onto my home street that I stopped and touched telegraph poles—‘Touch wood the drug of running never fails to get me high.’ I worried that it would cease one day: the chemical that running released in me would dry up its supply. This chemical had been my main entertainment in Scintilla. I had others, but the chemical was precious.
Earthquakes were an entertainment. They still are. Minor earthquakes caused by cattle trucks rattling and rumbling down the main street at night. In the very dead of night when I can’t sleep those earthquakes entertain me. I ask the dark, ‘How strong can quakes be before the bricks-and-mortar world of buildings tumbles?’ There is no figure, going by my count. ‘How many quakes can there be in one minute before Tilda wakes to reach her arm around me for reassurance that they’re only cattle trucks?’ Six so far in these past eight years. Most of the time Tilda stirs but doesn’t panic.
I listen for quakes arriving as far off as I can. It distracts me from the click in Tilda’s sleepy breathing, the annoying mechanics of her throat. When love has worked its way up through all the
mores
and reversed back down towards zero, a click in the throat becomes a revolting feature.
Galahs were an entertainment. Flocks of them, pink-feathered on phone wires. I hold their flight dear to me. The speed they go turns them silver as they swerve. They fly like one aeroplane made of a hundred little planes. In a blink they explode, regroup, change shape from a plane into an arrowhead. I don’t care if they do eat the farmers’ seed, you have to envy a creature born not to think, just thrive. No ambition, no dos
and don’ts. No knowledge except appetite.
Because, from that hair-counting period forward, ambition led me on. Freelance
Gazette
work was all very well, but a year of it and I had the pull of wanting something better. A city newspaper was the logical step but I needed more experience to go from Scintilla to there. I set myself a schedule to freelance at the
Gazette
another six months and then send off applications to Sydney and Melbourne. I didn’t expect to sail in on my first try but I did expect a little interest, a phone call saying
we’ll keep you in mind
or friendly letter of that nature. I sent my best
Gazette
pieces to prove my worth:
Meryl Furner isn’t considered a prickly person, unless you criticise her cacti…
All I got were reject notes: two paragraphs that amounted to
sorry,
not hiring
.
Your resumé is paltry.
Sincere regrets
. Six months later I tried again. The same thing happened. Throughout the next year, rejection, rejection. I rang four editors but didn’t get past their secretaries.
Who can blame them—
cactus stories
!
Only hicks from the back of nowhere call that news.
My ambition didn’t go away; it slowly fizzled into failure. I never let the failure show. I used my running chemical to dull it. It was my cure for everything. It kept me going for another three years, like a blank man.
Then the great mouse plague blessed me.
If I had to choose the best two weeks of my life I could not do better than the Scintilla mouse plague.
It was the mild autumn that did it. The right amount of sunshine, the humid drizzly rain. They bred in the stubble of the previous year’s harvest and feasted on leftover grain. Billions of them, fat as small rats. Like an Old Testament curse they flowed over the ground, grey as living water. They ate green stalks, root and all, and left the soil like colander holes for miles.
My brief from the
Gazette
was ‘the human angle. How does it feel to have your paddocks overrun, your home invaded by vermin?’
Holly, the paper’s cadet, the only in-house reporter, was assigned the economic impact: the estimated loss in dollar terms; the tonnes of plant matter eaten; the cost of ploughing up the damage and sowing life back into the land.
We worked well together, Holly and I. I drove while she scouted for photo opportunities. I interviewed housewives about the mouse-flood that scuttled through their kitchens, swept through their bedrooms, crawled over babies in cots. Holly took totals from their husbands about destruction per hectare. She jotted quotes about their budgets being buggered and how the government better get off its arse with financial assistance.
She was twenty-one but looked fifteen, with her boy-short hair, military trousers cut off at the shins, Doc Martens boots and saggy socks she kept bending down to hitch higher. A crush on someone is merely a nice way of saying lust. Lust implies you intend acting on your feelings. I was professional with Holly. There were moments when I was close to sending explicit signals but I didn’t have a hint she had similar ideas. There could have been ideas but I played it safe. The point is, I was being unfaithful. Not in body terms: in mind. Holly was the first time I developed those symptoms. I wanted the mouse plague to last until my crush ran out of fantasies.
‘You’re a really hard worker,’ Holly said.
I wasn’t working hard. I was pretending to need more interviews with people. That way I could have Holly in the car with me longer, her bare calves and cleavage. A real cleavage that split into two proper breasts for a few inches down her shirt.
Another reason I wanted the plague to keep going was the gift it gave me of a disaster: I was a proper reporter now. Helicopters flew in bringing dolled-up TV journos but
I
was the one who could boast of being a local. This was
my
plague. I had been here with my notebook from scratch. I hate a mouse plague as much as the next person, I told them. But when they’re in such vast numbers they’re not mice anymore. When you stand in the current of them they’re a force of nature. I was only big-noting myself but a tall shiny woman from Channel Nine liked my ‘force of nature’ imagery. Her brown fringe was frizzed so high, like a hedgerow of hair, she made me seem one foot shorter. She scrambled onto the roof of the
Gazette
car batting mice with her microphone and shoe heels. She wiggled her flick-knife fingernails in revulsion and said, ‘Could you wade in amongst them all, Con?’
‘Colin.’
‘Colin.’
‘In amongst them?’
In amongst them did not appeal to me but I was not going to lose face or pass up being on the tellie. I waded. With my teeth gritted I waded while they trained the cameras on me. I became ‘Mice Man’ on all the stations. I stood, hands on hips, and let the plague wash around my ankles. ‘Not enough traps in the world to trap these,’ I quipped. ‘Not enough Ratsak to kill this many.’
That fortnight I was on air four times, using ‘It is a devastating tragedy for the area’ as my closing comment. I practised saying it with different emphasis on different syllables each time.
At first Tilda was encouraging. She had me wear a shirt with stripes going longways: long downward stripes make a person look leaner, apparently. The camera puts pounds on you otherwise.
Then she changed her attitude as the plague persisted. She fished a lot, in the mental sense of fishing. ‘So, what’s it like being around those glamour-pusses?’
She fished for what Holly and I talked about together. ‘You spend so much time driving with her—you must have
some
conversation.’
‘We’re far too busy for conversation.’
‘I expect she’s too young for intelligent conversation. How old is she, twenty-one? She looks like jail bait.’
‘I hardly pay her any attention.’
‘Don’t go getting tickets on yourself, will you? I mean, I think you’re lovely to look at. But the camera hates your jowls. You’re not the natural photogenic type. I’m just trying to help you, darling.’
Tilda’s cleverest fishing was using role reversal. I first noticed it during the plague and it rattled me because of the guilt it gave. She said, ‘If you were an amputee my head would be turned by other men, I expect.’
‘That’s a strange thing to say.’
‘Tell me, do you ever look at a normal woman and think: That’s a
whole
woman?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t find yourself ogling them?’
‘No, of course not.’ I put a little scoff-laugh in the answer.
She asked, ‘Tell me about your day,’ and I would impart anecdotes about trainloads of charity hay arriving to feed starving sheep. Mice were migrating into the town proper: they had eaten farms bare and were on the scavenge. I made sure I mentioned Holly in these stories, but judgmentally, for Tilda’s sake: ‘She’s good at shorthand but has hopeless people skills.’ I complained she was a lazy kid and her big boots smelled of feet sweat. Lies Tilda never picked as lying. Or if she did she preferred believing them over not trusting me.
She had not been focussing on her artwork. Her hair-counting routine had produced a sculpture of sorts—samples from the plughole stuck onto drawing paper. She considered including them in a future painting, but not much painting was getting done. Her sickness had made her art sick as well. She had no patience anymore for pretty trivia like pictures. Van Gogh never had cancer, he was just mad and poor, she said. He was lucky. Mad and poor is not as disastrous as cancer. She’d take mad and poor any day over having death-fear relentlessly in her.
On the last day of the official plaguing—the Department of Agriculture had declared it come and gone—I remarked to Holly, ‘I’m going to miss this, you know.’ I would miss her too, of course—that was implicit in the comment, though I wasn’t about to state it outright. I was doing some fishing of my own. I was hoping she’d say she’d miss the plague too. I could then follow up with a clever line. Exactly what that line would be I wasn’t sure—I was too out of practice to swagger smooth lechery. I was grateful when she didn’t speak: I hadn’t embarrassed myself by making a pass; hadn’t given town gossipers the chance of a field day.
Mid-afternoon the CB radio crackled and gasped. It was Vigourman, with a favour to ask. There was a gentleman at the
Gazette
office, a Mr Cameron Wilkins. Had I heard of him?
No.
Vigourman certainly had. Cameron Wilkins was a writer with a national reputation, he said. A poet and playwright originally from Sydney, now a resident of Watercook. The clean country air assisted in his health problems. Two years earlier he’d been felled by a nasty bone cancer. It had gone to his brain but drugs and radiation had zapped it. He was thirty-three years old and married, his wife pregnant with their first child. ‘You never give up hope, that’s the lesson of Cameron Wilkins’ life. I don’t need to tell you it’s inspirational, Colin. Inspirational.’
The favour was this: could Holly and I give Mr Wilkins some assistance? Could he be directed to the best spots in which to view the plague’s devastation? The
Bulletin
magazine had commissioned a piece of literature from him—two pages of rhyming verse immortalising the resilience of the man on the land.
No problem, I said. Have him meet us in half an hour at the Barleyhusk Road weigh station.
Holly giggled, ‘There’s poetry in mouse plagues?’
‘Pardon?’ I said, though I heard perfectly well. I wanted her to lean closer and repeat herself. I wanted the tickle of her chewing-gum Ps popping breath on my ear.
Wilkins was hardly the most robust of men. He covered it up with a dense beard for a face wig, a dun cowboy hat for rugged panache. His shirt was a bushman’s kind—flannelette with red-and-black chequer patterns.
It had buttoned pockets over his chest where pens bulged like helpful padding. When I shook his hand it was like grasping boy bones. I relaxed my grip early in case I sprained him. He smiled whitely enough, which made me think: Teeth. They’re the last thing to go.
The main feature about Cameron Wilkins was not him but his wife. She stayed at their car after nodding hello, raised her face to get a blast of sun on it. She leant against the bonnet, hand across the belly dome in her T-shirt. It was like he was from hospital and she was from Spain—such a wickery mess of black hair, more wild shawl than human material. The U of her chin had a dimple at the bottom. Her face was wide and healthy-creamy. I thought: What does she see in him? I know what he sees in her. What does he have that, say, I wouldn’t?
I looked at her, then at Wilkins, then back at her. She was twenty-eight, twenty-nine, not much older than me. For all his thirty-three he was cancer-old. ‘Brains,’ I said to myself. ‘He must have brains and that compensates for a body gone bad. And he’s going to be a father—he’s still in working order down there. I bet he knows I’m thinking all this and feels cocksure proud.’
I had dumped Holly by now. I was too distracted by Mrs Wilkins. Mrs Donna Wilkins. She was a more respectable subject for ogling, being pregnant and therefore out of reach. I wasn’t about to lean close for her breath poppings.
I led Cameron through swirling chaff between the weigh station silos. I said, ‘Chaff. That’s all the bastards left, chaff. They gorged on silo grain—don’t ask me how they got in through the concrete but they did and they gorged. Ate themselves to death.’ I took a standing position that kept Donna in my view, the sun behind me and in Cameron’s eyes. Her face was still upturned, as if she was showering in dry sunlight. A spinning top of dust blew around her. She shielded her eyes and turned her back against painful grit in the wind.
I came to my head-shaking senses. ‘What are you doing? Stop it,’ I muttered, closing my eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Cameron.
‘Yes. Yes. Just dust.’ I blinked and picked at pretend eye trouble and silently berated myself: you’ve got a sick woman at home—you should be thinking about her. You’ve got enough on your plate with hair-counting and rifles and weedkiller without being face to face with a decent fellow and feeling sweet poison in you for his wife.
‘Listen, Cameron,’ I said. ‘I have to go. I’d like to show you around more but I have commitments.’ I advised him to drive north-west to the most plague-ravaged places. Call in at the Mallock Mallock general store. The owners, Claude and Verity, would tell of how they slept in the bath because mouse feet couldn’t climb the slippery sides. I promised to ring him if I thought of any quirky details he might find useful for his piece. I jotted down his number, shook his thin hand. I made a point of not even waving to
her
at the car.
When I got home I embraced Tilda. I told her I would cook dinner this evening, which was unusual—I can’t boil eggs. It was all part of an apology she didn’t know I was giving. I felt purged by it, if only until bed. We congressed. Or rather, we serviced. It was servicing to me. I imagined Holly beneath me, not Tilda. Then I imagined Donna, how gentle one would have to be to accommodate her tender belly. Holly, Donna, I alternated between the two. I had to concentrate not to let slip a moan of their names.