‘… you got me worried, boy. I never did anything like it before. Don’t know what came over me. I been thinkin’ about it — what you must think …’
The penitent must have had a fair idea of his bearings, either from instinct or from a glimmer of light the hawthorns allowed through their locked branches, for he reached a point where he crashed on the stretcher alongside its occupant.
Prowse was crying, expostulating, and apparently stark naked. Eddie’s own fastidious nakedness became aware of prickling hair, tingling with moisture like a rain forest, at the same time the smell exuded by sodden human fur. He was surrounded by, almost dunked in, these practically liquid exhalations.
What was both alarming and gratifying, he knew that he was being won over, not by the orange brute so much as poor old Prowse of the snapshots with meticulous white-ink captions, the husband of Kath, and by the spirit of Angelos Vatatzes, whose cold eyelids and rigid feet still haunted memory.
It was too much for Eddie Twyborn to endure. He was rocking this hairy body in his arms, to envelop suffering in some semblance of love, to resuscitate two human beings from drowning.
Prowse managed to extricate himself. He rolled over.
‘Go on,’ he moaned, ‘Ed!’ and bit the pillow.
Eddie Twyborn’s feminine compassion which had moved him to tenderness for a pitiable man was shocked into what was less lust than a desire for male revenge. He plunged deep into this passive yet quaking carcase offered up as a sacrifice. He bit into the damp nape of a taut neck. Hair sprouting from the shoulders, he twisted by merciless handfuls as he dragged his body back and forth, lacerated by his own vengeance.
Prowse was crying, ‘Oh God! Oh Christ!’ before a final whimper which was also his ravisher’s sigh.
They fell apart finally.
Eddie said, ‘Go on, Don. That’s what it’s about, that’s what you wanted.’
He couldn’t deny it, except, ‘I hope you won’t hold it against me, Eddie.’
‘Go on, get out!’
Prowse heaved, protested, curled himself into the shape of a prawn against a form which, having vindicated itself, refused to respond. Prowse’s sighs of entreaty, his redundancies of love, were surprisingly like Marcia’s.
‘If that’s what you say — and feel.’
‘All I want to say is, I’ll catch the train tomorrow evening at Fossickers, and would like you to run me over, Don. Otherwise, if you’d rather, I’ll hire a car from town.’
After a short whimpering silence, ‘If that’s what you’ve decided, I’ll run yer there.’
A damp paw put out on a renewed voyage of exploration. Eddie Twyborn rejected it, in spite of the scabs on the obverse side, the dry cracks, and the freckles he remembered.
‘Go on, Don — get!’ It sounded unconvincingly male.
The manager heaved, the stretcher creaked. Prowse was diving in the direction of the doorway. He must have bumped his head or some other part of his anatomy on something more solid than darkness.
He cried out, ‘Oh Jesus! Oh fuck!’ before slewing round the corner into the passage, slithering several yards on the lino, and falling into his own room.
Mrs Tyrrell was tearful. ‘I dunno wot’s took you, Eddie. I thought you was more dependable. Most men aren’t dependable. Rowley weren’t — though ’e was me husband, an’ dead since. The boys aren’t — they got their wives. Only the girls. Well, that’s ’ow it is. I thought you was different — like me daughters, but different.’
Eddie was at first embarrassed, then moved to feel her weather-cured face, together with a smear of tears, ground against his cheek. At the same time he became enveloped in the bobbled shawl, in whiffs of kero, eaudy Cologne, and the overall stench of mutton fat.
A brown-paper parcel was thrust at him. ‘A few bloody sandwiches fer the journey. There’s mustard in ’em ter make ’em more tasty.’
In the corrugated shed the manager was revving up the Ford, the afternoon light as remorseless as the fossicking hens.
Eddie Twyborn could only say, ‘We’ll write, Peggy,’ regretting that it sounded so upper class.
‘ ’Oo’ll write? You, if I’m lucky. But ’oo’s gunner read it to me? ’Oo that I can trust — at “Bogong”—or anywheres — fer that matter?’
He got himself out, together with the greasy parcel, the suitcase and valise with which he had arrived, lighter for his boots and work clothes which he was leaving for Denny. The too ostentatious cabin trunk was already strapped to the rack.
The manager drove doggedly, his heavy hands bumped by the wheel. Eddie dared not look at the hands, let alone the face, which smelled overpoweringly of shaving soap.
In a paddock through which they were passing, sulphur-crested cockatoos were screeching as they tore down stooks of oats.
‘Bloody cockies! You can’t win,’ Prowse mumbled; he sounded fairly acceptant for the moment.
‘Greg’ll be back,’ he announced farther on, as though pleased to think his responsibility for marauding cockatoos, and anything else, might be ended by the owner’s return. ‘Nothing lasts for ever, eh?’
He glanced sideways, no doubt hoping for his passenger to corroborate, or even suggest that past events are expungeable if you put your will to it.
Eddie did not return the glance for fear of finding a mirror to his own thoughts. Instead, he glanced down and encountered the wrist-watch. A utilitarian affair, sitting rather high on the hairy wrist, the watch was attached to a sweat-eaten strap, narrow to the point of daintiness. He had barely noticed this watch before. Now it wrung him. Had he been a child instead of this pseudo-man-cum-crypto-woman, he might have put out a finger and touched it, to the consolation of both of them.
In the light of shared desire, it was some consolation to himself to remember a moment in which he had embraced, not so much a lustful male, as a human being exposed in its frailty and tenderness.
This, of course, was no consolation to Don Prowse. Who knew. Who knew. But only the half of it.
They drove bumping through the paddocks, and as on arrival, so on departure, brumby horses wheeled and approached, eyeing them through wild forelocks, sheep milled and halted and stamped, wooden masks conveying that expression of disbelief for the same two intruders, who had got to know each other in the meantime, so much better, or so much worse.
They drove, and arrived at Fossickers Flat.
Prowse looked at the wristwatch and grumbled, ‘Don’t know why you got us here so early.’
And Eddie replied, ‘I arrive everywhere too early, or too late. It’s my worst vice.’ He laughed, but Prowse’s expression could have been taken for thoughtful.
After unloading the luggage they stood about together on the siding.
‘Look, Don, you don’t have to hang about.’
But Don did: mouthing, swallowing words to which the thick lips failed to give birth.
‘Should ’uv rung to reserve a sleeper. But you caught me on the hop, Ed.’
‘Probably no sleepers left. Not at the last moment. Anyhow, I don’t expect I’ll sleep.’
Was it too perilous an admission? They crunched up and down the siding, beneath the painted sign FOSSICKERS FLAT. A rudimentary shelter might have offered asylum to a parcel, never to escaping prisoners or queered lovers. In the scrub across the track, the zither notes of small birds seemed to be conveying bird facts which evaded expression in human terms.
‘We’ll all miss you, Eddie.’
‘Oh, go on, Don! Don’t be a cunt — for God’s sake go!’
GO!
Legs apart, shoulders hunched, the bare hills behind him, the man looked every bit a puzzled, panting, red ox.
But as time ticked away on the crude wristwatch, it was Eddie Twyborn awaiting the pole-axe.