The manager, the two stockmen, the jackeroo himself, all were looking to the owner to dissolve the state of impotence to which his position had reduced them. But Mr Lushington implied only obliquely, by a drawn-out whinnying sigh, that he had absorbed his manager’s information. Still smiling from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, he sat looking, not at the young man recommenhded to is patronage, but at the chain of distant hills.
‘The Judge’s son,’ Eddie Twyborn thought he heard before the grazier turned his chestnut and, preceded by the terrier pack, made for the paddocks, the respectful manager and two stockmen leaping at their saddles, the jackeroo almost rupturing himself as he landed on a pommel, on the razor-back of his awkwardly articulated nag.
As a boy on holiday in the country Eddie sat ponies no better and no worse than others, but had lost his dignity astraddle the beast known as the Blue Mule. He took up a position at the rear of the Lushington cavalcade, thumping with his heels at unresponsive ribs.
The party crossed the jingling bridge, hooves spanking over loosely-linked planks, and headed out along the flat. An anus opened and disgorged, a vulva split and gushed. Only the ostracised Eddie Twyborn at the tail end was to any extent aware of such events. Greg Lushington and Don Prowse were turned in their saddles towards each other, exchanging esoteric information, the one wearing his normal protective smile, while the other had pinned on the bland badge of unashamed sycophancy. Between the head and the rear of the column rode the apathetic stockmen, blue-serge shoulder blades resigned to the action of their brumbies’ razor-cruppered, harsh-coated rumps.
Eddie’s nose began to run, his eyes to smart from the wind, and a little from humiliation. All he had experienced of life left him, not that it would have been of much use, reduced as he was to ignorant boyhood in remotest Patagonia. There was surely some dormant instinct he could summon up in self-defence. After all, he had been decorated, officially for valour, though actually for a desperate instinct which had carried him across no-man’s-land in what they considered the desired direction. Now, in a man’s world as opposed to no-man’s-land, with a litter of rational, unrevealing clues replacing the irrational signposts of nightmare, he found himself at a loss. In his boyhood he had shown a slight talent for wood-carving (a kookaburra on a cigar-box lid) and for tying some of the fancier knots. With another boy he had modelled a crusaders’ castle in plasticine; they had won a prize. These were all he could produce out of the waste-bin of memory to pit against the esoterica of Gregory Lushington and Don Prowse; even less open to human advances the two stockmen, whose silence and primitive forms suggested links with chthonic forces.
So Eddie Twyborn thumped desperately with his heels at the shaggy barrel of the Blue Mule, who refused to share his rider’s urge to keep up with the cavalcade, perhaps accepting disdain as the passport to a peaceful existence; while the rider was forced to admit that he had to shine, regardless of geography, climate, or whichever sexual role he was playing.
As he continued thumping automatically at his wholly unresponsive mount, loss of faith in himself was replaced by an affinity with the landscape surrounding him. It happened very gradually, in spite of a sadistic wind, the sour grass, deformed trees, rocks crouching like great animals petrified by time. A black wagtail swivelling on a grey-green fence-post might have been confusing an intruder had he not been directing one who knew the password. The red road winding through the lucerne flat into the scurfy interior seemed to originate in memory, along with the wood-carving, boy-scout knots, and plasticine castle. For all the contingent’s knowledgeable remarks on wool, scours, fluke and bluestone as they mounted the contours of Bald Hill, the scene’s subtler depths were reserved for the outcast-initiate.
He allowed his horse to convey him at last as the latter would have wished. The two of them furled in the gusty swaths of an autumn gale, snatched at by meagre, isolated trees, warned by the cawing of watchful crows, the animal seemed to maintain a logical distance between themselves and what is considered normality.
Whenever the cavalcade halted the laggards drew abreast to the tune of renewed outbursts of instruction from the boss and ‘yes yes Mr Lushington’ from his acquiescent manager, ‘bluestone the creeks termorrer,’ bluestone being the apparent panacea. In the keen air it glittered for Eddie-Eudoxia like a Byzantine jewel.
The stockmen had ridden off to muster the mob of Bald Hill wethers, the chief objective of this somewhat desultory expedition, Like a cluster of parasites infesting a hide of almost identical colour, the dirty fleeces of the sheep could be seen in slight motion in a cleft of the stony hillside.
Embracing the panorama with a Napoleonic gesture, the grazier announced, presumably for his protégé, ‘Wonderful sheep country. You wouldn’t find better on the Hunter, though the fellers up there don’t care to admit it.’
Eddie did not know what to do beyond grunt back in manly fashion. His boss seemed appeased.
By now the shouts of the stockmen had startled the mob of sheep, and the frantic exertions of the little faded kelpie were keeping them bunched as she drove them in the right direction.
On arrival, the sheep propped, milled in tight formation, then fanning out, stood coughing and staring, some of them stamping. Awaiting further orders from her tyrant, the kelpie flattened herself on the stones.
‘A wormy-lookin’ lot,’ their owner grumbled. ‘Need a good drenchin’. Drench ’em, Prowse.’
Though the manager may have felt his employer was intent this morning on thinking up jobs to impress a newcomer, he agreed that the sheep looked wormy and ought to be drenched; wasn’t it his mission in life to tell Mr Lushington what he wanted to hear?
The latter had lost interest in his sheep. He was leading his entourage in another direction, when Denny’s mongrel deerhounds put up a rabbit. They gave chase. The leader snapped. Between them they tore their squealing prey to bits, and devoured it down to the last inch of opalescent entrail and bloodied fur.
Mr Lushington had slowed down his chestnut until on a level with his jackeroo’s nag. ‘Bit boring for you,’ he said somewhat surprisingly, ‘until you learn what it’s all about.’ He dug with his whip-handle at the Blue Mule’s withers. ‘Perhaps you never will. Perhaps you aren’t for it.’
Eddie suspected Gregory Lushington was endowed with more perception than he realised, but mumbled back, ‘It’s what I’m here for,’ and was immediately depressed by the lack of logic in his remark.
The logic of those with whom he had been brought together was as simple and direct as the glimpses of illogic in the landscape around them were subtly diffused. But Mr Lushington’s next remark made it hard to decide where he, or indeed, anybody stood. Turning his full gaze on his new acquisition as he had not up till now, he told him, ‘In Sweden they boil a piece of fish skin in the coffee. It’s supposed to bring out the flavour.
‘And does it?’
‘Opinions vary,’ Mr Lushington said.
He continued staring full face at his protégé from behind the gold-framed spectacles with a solemnity the younger man could only return.
Till simultaneously each burst out laughing.
It was too much for the manager. He had lost control of his star puppets. He began to scowl. There was a smell of class in the air.
Greg Lushington had turned his back on the present. ‘Your dad used to come down here. Do a bit of fishin’. When we were younger …’ From his fixed stare and muted tone of voice, old Lushington was re-living it visually. ‘A good looker in those days. Still is — the Judge. And you’ve inherited the looks — if I may say so without turning a young man’s head.’