‘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.
Chapter 45
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.
Chapter 46
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.