Grassdogs Read online

  For Mick and in memory of our brother Pete

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dedication

  Preliminary Submission

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Celebrating New Writing

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preliminary Submission

  I am a man not persuaded much by landscape, although my mother has impressed on me that we each return to the earth from which we come. Or try to. Not that I have ever seen her pay much attention to the particular patch of earth from which she fled as soon as she was able. No, if there is anything to be learned here it is that one’s parents are, in my opinion, usually mistaken about most things. Past is past. But misconceptions are hereditary, and the child will defend them in his blindness unto death. Being wrong does not mean being any less passionate about it.

  I see I am covering too much ground.

  To continue more simply:

  I purr along the highway, changing gear on hairpin bends, the radio turned up loud. Trying not to think about my destination. Paying attention only to the road. I overtake trucks and Volvos. Nice to be out in the country, but that is all that is nice about it.

  The Law has nothing to do with the truth, as Warren Pennington, senior partner with my firm, never tires of lecturing. The truth is malleable. And justice, like truth, is relative. Life is defendable, for a fee.

  This is the man we have commissioned to free my uncle.

  By the same token my mother never told me that I had an uncle until I was ten years old, and we were about to meet him. My feeling has always been that if they wanted to keep me in the dark then what should I care about the nature of their estrangements? Especially given what he was. In the Law and in the lounge room, secrecy and subterfuge are the norm.

  I pull into the car park, find a space, and listen to the ticking of the motor beneath the bonnet. I am early. I watch the gate open and a white truck come out. At the foot of the great, grey wall not a blade of grass is growing. The grass has been banished to the far side of the car park. I open the file lying on the passenger seat and on top of the brief is a newspaper photo of my uncle. Our Client.

  I do not particularly care that I have an uncle. The one my father refers to by the solitary syllable, ‘Hmph’. His opinion has never really counted for much. When you live in different cities the distance is more than geographical. I know the myth, but I do not bother myself with the reasons why my mother ran away from home to the anonymous haven of the city. It is her business. As my life is mine. If it has been her ambition to give me the upbringing she herself has not received, then, well and good. I have not asked for it. I take everything as my due. I am sure I would have thrived on neglect as much as on the honesty of her poverty.

  I was born with the common congenital deformity of the hard palate in the roof of my mouth. By all accounts the nasal septum and vomer bone are absent and the first eighteen months of my infancy can be regarded as a clinical affair. All this is hearsay, of course, as there are no photographs of me as a baby in existence. (Wouldn’t want Emily to get hold of those.) My mother never speaks to me of it, for which I have been grateful. The wonders of modern medicine have rectified all trace of any abnormality and I recall nothing of the remedial speech training I later received. All that thriving. The only repercussion now is that I must be careful when swimming in chlorinated water (I was a grommety kid), although I have never explained why this is to Emily. She simply thinks I am a very kissable bad swimmer, and God knows, she says, there’s room enough in this world for bad swimmers as well as good. Anyway, swimming is not something a busy young solicitor with a demanding schedule has a lot of time for. There is no catharsis here, I hope—

  But I see I am covering too much ground again.

  I close the car door and it beeps its locks at me. I march across the concourse in my suit.

  Back then, in Melbourne, living on the meagre, single wage of my father, Gordon Tindale, my parents must have spent years under not inconsiderable financial strain.

  In the gatehouse an officer stares at me through thick perspex. I state my business. I hand over my keys and mobile phone. Someone comes out to muss through the papers in my briefcase. I sign in, and print in the visitors’ book the name of the inmate I am here to see. The heavy, steel door springs open with an electronic whine. Is this my luminous vision?

  Seven months ago, my mother flew up to see me with the unwelcome memory of an uncle I have met but once (do I remember?) who now needs my help. Who? She has a file of newspaper clippings. How can I help?

  By paying attention, she says.

  She also has a history in which I should have a vested interest, in a landscape as new to me as the moon; the foreign earth from which she came.

  Now I pass through the gate. I begin to pay attention.

  ONE

  The mother’s silky was the first. Its ears full of grass seeds. Then he could remember a waddling Labrador that adopted him. The father’s kelpies and cattle dogs, Rex and Bex, or the parents of Rex and Bex, rattling their chains in their drums. One by one the dogs came. They gathered together in the mother’s decrepit house, which nestled in a dish scooped out of the earth that could not be called a valley, beyond the desolate edge of one town, before the ragged council fringes of the next.

  After the father’s death, the nameless farm, which had been a burden to them always, was whittled down to feed the parasites of bankers. Good riddance, said the mother, in time. They would survive on air and eggs. Only rats would flee the sinking ship.

  In time all they were left with was the weatherbeaten house, smooth as driftwood, with its raw boards surrounded by grass, baking under the sun. A few acres, gnawed to the roots. All that thrived were weeds. And dogs. These acres were the only buffer between the world he knew and the encroaching universe that was Dungay’s farm. On the other side of the boundary fence, Dungay’s sheep were fat—they did not get braxy, his canola grew tall and yellow as the sun, his cows did not get bloat. The air over his earth smelled rich with superphosphate.

  Fences meant nothing to the boy, Edgar. To him the world was green and limitless. The old combine harvester in its shed, full of mice, rusting into the ground, was like a statue in a temple. Earth was earth, whether it was on this side of the fence or the other. A wonder to behold, and sometimes, when he was an infant, he would stuff fistfuls of it into his mouth.

  His mouth.

  When the harvester was gone, taken by the re-possessors, the shed was still a temple only bigger. Thin straws of sunlight dropped down from empty nailholes in the roof like filaments of web, or shadows of swirling light in a river. As he grew, Edgar liked to spend time in there, doodling in the dust, or hunting mice, until one or other of the dogs came to lick his hand. The father, Alf, whose roles as farmer and provider had been taken from him, shooed the boy out into the fresh air so that he could be alone in his great empty shed. Edgar would sneak in later to see what he’d been up to and find piles of crooked nails arranged into circles, or two spanners leaning against each other for balance. And the growing stack of empty bottles. Edgar could understand the attraction of the shed, where such things could be accomplished. Sometimes the father even slept out there, muttering to himself in the darkness. The dogs followed Edgar, who learned how to roam at a young age. Those animals had been farm dogs—Rex and Bex, good solid work dogs with nothing now to do. Of course they would follow him. Edgar was the most active thing in their lives. They taught him curiosity, and Edgar had not a moment’s tedium in his boyhood.

  Part of what
he ran from was their arguing. The perpetual squabbling which would sometimes descend into violence. The mother gave as good as she got, and once Edgar saw her tip a mug of steaming tea on the father’s snoring head. The house dog yapped madly, dancing between their fumbling struggle, and the father booted it across the room.

  The mother kept her silky terrier inside with her. Its hair was a beautiful blend of blue-black and sandy-brown, which matched a memory Edgar had of the father’s own hair. There must have been more than one house dog, for Edgar recalled that there had always been a silky. The stay-at-home dog. It would sleep in Edgar’s lap until his legs grew numb.

  The mother baked scones. She smelled of flour.

  If, during his roaming, Edgar skinned his knee or stubbed a toe he would get the dogs to lick it. They seemed to like this and lined up to take turns. The mother said it was disgusting, the way he took after the father. He’d get germs. He’d get gangrene, or catch a parasite. She wished them out of her kitchen and quick-sticks about it, waving a wooden spoon like a sceptre. It sounded like much else of her hollow way of speaking to him, which he didn’t understand. And he’d bolt.

  For those who like omens, even Edgar’s birth foretold the trouble he would come to cause. The mother’s labour pains began prematurely. The father was spraying in the top paddock. Thinking they were Braxton Hicks contractions, the mother carried on working. Soon it became obvious they were not. She called but no one came. By the time Alf got back to the house, the mother was halfconscious on the kitchen floor in a pool of amniotic fluid, covered in a dusting of flour. Alf bundled her into the ute and sped to the Base Hospital, forty minutes away in the big city of Wagga. A bit of the umbilical cord was already protruding. The amnion had ruptured. Fathers in those days (‘Thank Christ’) were not permitted to watch a caesarean section. Even though butchering a heifer was next to nothing. It was much safer to pace the floor. In addition the cord was tight about the infant’s neck, his head bluer than the rest of the blue body, mottled with meconium. The doctor feared he was stillborn, but as he cut away the cord the baby squawked—through, they all now saw, a gaping cleft palate. Perhaps, the father thought, it might have been better had he been lost: give the kid a dong on the noggin, like an unwanted kitten. But Edgar was resilient. In fact, after his shaky start, he thrived. He was a weed. He lived on nothing. Everyone found reasons to blame themselves. Alf, for instance, who never grew used to looking at the mouth, saying it was all his fault and the kid was the result of a drunken fuck.

  Father Fletcher wanted to baptise the boy, but Alf would not let him.

  The surgery that followed a few years later was, unlike mine, less than successful. The cleft palate was incompletely repaired, leaving Edgar with a great weal in his lip that dominated not only his face, but his whole way of speaking and confronting the world.

  At least, the father used to say, pacing the kitchen, it was a damn sight better than the little turnip-headed gargoyle they had brought home from the hospital, who didn’t stop drooling.

  ‘I coulda done a better job meself with a bit of baling twine,’ he used to say of the son who would one day inherit the farm.

  Edgar had a dim memory of the family sitting around the table in the kitchen. Had there always been just the three of them? Weren’t there more? Moths tapped at the window. Edgar threw food for the silky. The parents were talking about him. He knew this by their tone, the occasional glances, and the words that buzzed and hissed and clicked in his ears like the sounds of insects. He looked at their mouths moving, pieced together the sounds which tumbled out. The father sometimes stood behind the highchair and clapped his hands loudly. Edgar would not scare.

  Edgar ate moths. He ate dirt. Once he ate a mouse. When they laced gloves to his little wrists he gnawed them off. They gave up slapping his hands. The growling sound that said ‘don’t’ was, he thought for a long time, his name. Needless to say he loved his parents, as he loved the silky and the others. Once, as they ate silently at their wooden table, the mother suddenly jumped to her feet coughing hideously. She tried riotously to pound her own back. Gagged for some water.

  ‘A bit of pepper on the old tonsil,’ she managed to say hoarsely, her face purple.

  The mother’s fit subsided. Edgar’s father turned to him.

  ‘Let that be a lesson to yer, Ed my lad, never marry a woman unless yer can stand ter watch ‘er chokin’ with a bit of pepper on ‘er tonsil.’

  The mother guzzled at the tap.

  ‘Thanks for nothin’, yer great lummox.’

  Whenever the father toured the paddocks, or even travelled into town in the old ute, it was a treat for Edgar to be allowed to sit up on the tray with the work dogs. If he ever fell off, bumping over ditches, the father would say:

  ‘It ain’t no picnic for me either, son.’

  Soon the father whistled him up there with the dogs when work was done. Edgar would look back in wonder along the line of freshly cut hay, bound and scattered like building bricks, or coiled up like a cake shop of snails. He learned to keep his balance and not fall off. There seemed to be the joy of contest up there with the dogs, the wind in their open mouths. Edgar hung on tight. He had the better of them. He was their master.

  In town he would stay up on the tray while the parents disappeared into the supermarket, or the hardware-and-farm supplies, or the bank, or the hotel, or any number of other businesses. All these things he had to learn about. Some days they spent a lot of time inside. Others, a short time. Edgar was not very good at knowing how much time had passed. He could, however, sense a change in their mood, their state of mind when they emerged from these businesses, although he did not know what these states of mind might mean. From the supermarket, laden with shopping bags, they seemed resolute, fortified. From the bank they emerged miserable, angry. They seemed happiest when they burst from the pub, staggering with bottles that they dumped in the back with him. He did not know the songs that they sang:

  ‘A-hubba hubba hubba, a-hello Jack

  A-hubba hubba hubba, I just got back

  A-hubba hubba hubba, a-whadda you know?

  It was mighty smoky over Tokyo.’

  He watched them collapse into the front seat of the cabin, their laughter suddenly cut short by the doors. Search and fumble for the keys. He saw the strange looks the dogs gave both of them through the back window, ears cocked, heads on one side, trying to make a little sense of the world.

  One day, after the windy drive to town, as they waited parked in the street, Edgar jumped out of the ute. The sky did not darken. The ground did not open up. He wandered to the corner, then wandered back. The blue heeler, Rex, remained in the back, still loyal to the father, standing on an old tarpaulin. The earth did not tremble. Edgar wandered in the other direction, gauging his distance from the ute. He found a cake shop and gazed in the window. The town was filled with noise and turbulence. The first time he heard a siren he ran back to the ute and took his cue from the dogs by hiding under the tarp. There was so much going on. It was infectious, the buzzing language of the town. The cars that hissed past on the wet street. His reflection in shop windows as he marched by. The armless, naked mannequins being clothed in the dress shop windows. He stopped and stared until a woman in the window flapped her hand at him irritably. But Edgar was not staring at their nudity, which was more akin to udders at milking time. He was staring at their smooth limblessness. He wondered if his own severed arms would look so pure.

  He loved the smells of the cake shop best. He moved on until he came to a building he had seen in passing but never taken much notice of before. Nor had he ever seen the parents enter it. What funny business went on in there? A sign which he could not read proclaimed: Jesus Saves. He heard robust music. The big wooden doors were not locked. Inside it was dark and cavernous, like the empty shed at home. He noticed the stained-glass windows, covered from the outside by wire mesh. Pictures of naked babes with sparrow wings. Ox hearts. He smelled the candlewax. Walking quietly up the aisle
he was startled by a young man with a whiskered dimple in his chin, who emerged from a side door and stared at him.

  ‘Hailyoungfellow. Whatdoyouwant? Areyoulost?’

  Edgar said nothing. He did not fully understand the man’s words, but he understood the tone. It was the warning growl of ownership over a morsel when another dog comes too close. The man pressed a button on the tape deck hidden in the shadows and the music stopped.

  ‘Speakupboy,’ taking a step, ‘Whathappened toyourface? Comehereintothelight.’

  Edgar was fast. He was outside, slowing to a walk in the sunshine before the man growled out something else from the doorway. Edgar looked back with perfect confidence in the abilities of his own body.

  Just along the street Edgar was surprised to find, sitting there on the footpath, a bucket of food. Good smells came from it. He parted some of the papers with his hands to find out what it was. It was half a lamington. He looked up and two boys his own size were standing staring at him. He had the lamington in his hands.

  ‘You’re a dirty pig,’ said one.

  ‘You’re a spaz,’ said the other.

  ‘Lookit his gob.’

  ‘What a pig.’

  Edgar stamped his foot, as if to take a step towards them, but they sauntered off, equally confident, looking back at him.

  ‘Hail, fellows.’

  The priest in the doorway stood aside to let them enter.

  ‘Good morning, Father Fletcher.’

  ‘Do you know that boy?’

  ‘No, Father Fletcher.’

  ‘He looks familiar.’

  ‘No Father.’

  They glanced at Edgar, before the man eased the wooden door shut. In a while the sound of singing started again. Edgar ate.

  Back at the ute the parents still had not returned. The world did not end. Time had stopped still. The dogs were glad to see him and smell him as he clambered into the back. They laid their cold noses against his skin. Soon enough, in the distance he saw the parents staggering towards them.