The Place by Evie Wyld

1

they have been married a few years when Bobby leaves Carol and their new baby and goes bush to shoot kangaroos. It is all the work he can think of to do when the force let him go. They tell him that if he goes quietly and makes no noise about losing his pension, charges will be dropped. While he’s there, finally with the peace and quiet, he tells Carol he’ll make a plan. A man can’t think with the baby crying all the time and the house smelling of Dettol and milk powder. He leaves Carol sitting on his mother’s plasticwrapped sofa, dark and silent, only the anger left now.

“She’ll come around in a day or two,” his mother says at the door, “I’ll make her come around.”

2

He loads his truck with whisky and 20 cans of meat and beans. He checks for matches and drinking water, bullets and oil. He packs his rod in case he comes across a good spot for fishing; he’ll need to fill the daylight hours with something. As he pulls away he feels the tightening in his chest loosen. He’ll miss Carol’s solid body in the bed next to him and the wormy movement of his son in sleep. But he won’t miss not knowing what to do and how to help; the help Carol says she wants isn’t the kind he can give her. His hands aren’t made for it. He’d taken a bunch of stuff to the pawn shop; his dad’s guitar, some pinched jewellery his mum never wore, but it all turned out to be fake, and the guitar was worthless.

“I’ll give you something for that watch, though,” the man at the shop said. Bobby touched the face of his watch, a gift from his brother once he’d started making the big money.

“Nah, you’re all right,” he’d said. He left the guitar in the shop, put the jewellery back in his mum’s keepsake box.

3

They pay the most per tail up north and he has a spot in mind. The old man took them there when they were kids — him and his brother — to show them how the bush went in the dark. He remembers nights awake, lying next to his brother, watching the whites of his eyes as he pretended to be asleep. Always watchful, that one, always listening out for the old man’s tone.

4

It’s dawn by the time Bobby arrives at the place. He cracks open the whisky, pours some into his tin cup and watches the stars blink out above him. He’ll find the kid a snake skin. It’ll take more than that with Carol. He must think of a plan for them, get them out of his mother’s house. She means well but she can’t keep her thoughts to herself. She tells Carol a couple of times a day, “You’re making a rod for your back,” and she says it about any number of things.

“You need to get us out of here, Bob,” Carol had whispered one night in bed. “Because I’m going to scream — or something worse.”

They listened to the sound of his mother turning over in her bed, the plink of her dentures dropping into the glass. He didn’t sleep at all that night, staring at the ceiling, imagining he could reverse time and not make the mistake that had got him the boot.

Under the trees, Bobby sleeps deeply in the back tray and wakes at dusk to the sound of bush stone-curlews and nightjars and things guttering about beneath his truck.

It’s the still moment he goes after. When everything happens at the speed you ask of it. That first night he hears them bounding in the dark, every which way, his lamp picking up a mess of tails and shoulders, and then there is one that looks back towards him, and he has it in the lamp light and it’s looking right at him with those

red metal eyes. The moment trails and Bobby hears the countdown of its life. He holds the light still a good 20 seconds, daring the kangaroo to tear itself away. He squeezes and the gun echoes through the bones of his arms and the animal goes down. There’s a soft blue smoke at the gun’s mouth.

5

Bobby and Carol first meet at the bowling club. It’s a fancy-dress affair, someone’s birthday, and Bobby has dressed himself as Superwoman. Carol is a pirate. She has a rubber chicken that she holds by the neck, because she couldn’t get hold of a parrot. Bobby buys her a rum and Coke, Carol puts down her chicken. The old man just a couple of years in the ground, the freedom of it blooms across Bobby’s chest. Carol is smooth and nut brown. She laughs when the socks fall out of his bra, and later when he has to roll down his blue tights. Bobby squeezes her rubber chicken so that it honks.

6

He takes the first batch of tails into the nearest cattle station after a week, when the oldest ones start to stink at the root, and he wires the money on to Carol from the dusty shop behind the service station. He has a wash using the water for the cows’ trough after he notices the cashier keeping his mouth tightly shut against the smell. He could keep going on the road back to Carol and the kid. He calls her from the payphone, but it doesn’t go to plan. Carol tells him to come home.

“Your mother is un-fucking-bearable… she won’t stop telling me what I’m doing wrong.” “She’s only trying to help.”

The kid wails in the background and Carol swears under her breath, is close to tears. He hears his mother call sharply,

“Carol… that baby’s crying again. Carol?” He finds himself going straight back into the bush. He doesn’t like to hear Carol complain about his mother. He doesn’t like to think about how small a dent the roo money will be making. What he won’t do is ask for help from his brother.

That’s a stretch too far. His brother with his house and his put-together wife and kids. Middle management, he calls it, but to look at him in his suit you’d think he’d joined the Mormons.

Bobby gets back under the trees. Another go at it, no mistakes this time. He finds a brown snake sunning itself on a rock, the skin has started to crisp about its head and Bobby sits watching for hours. When it starts to move off he follows, a fraction annoyed that it has not left him with its skin. That would be something to tick off the list.

7

The last time the three of them went bush, his brother had held a gun on their father for laying into Bobby because he left the bait meat in the sun. The old man had stood there not speaking, his hands still fists, then walked off and was gone all night and most of the next day. They had packed up the truck, eaten from cold cans in silence. When their father returned, smiling, he held two dead wallabies, their throats slit, talked about how he’d stalked them all night then picked them off. You wouldn’t kill a wallaby — their pretty faces. You wouldn’t eat one, either, though the old man made a show of cutting them up and feeding the dogs when they got home. He never brought up his brother and the gun. The night before his brother left for the mines he took Bobby out drinking and said, “You watch him. He plays dead but he’s not.”

8

When he next thinks to look at the date on his watch, he has been there a fortnight. He comes alive at dusk without even the taste of a hangover in his mouth, even as he powers through the whisky, forgets the last time he drank water. The roos fall under him, and he starts to feel that they are coming for him, giving themselves up, that he is something that belongs to the land, and every tail he cuts loose of its body feels like the dead proof that he belongs here in the dark, that he is working for a higher cause than money.

This time when he takes the tails in to the station, he doesn’t wash or call home. The money is not worth sending after he’s restocked bullets and gun oil, and taken enough whisky to last him. He discards his watch, doesn’t want the glow of it to give him away; just undoes the strap and lets it fall to the ground and walks away.

The tails go bad quickly and he wakes one dusk to find that during the day in a drunken halfsleep he has thrown most of them into the creek. He’s not worried, more will come. Sometimes there is too much whisky to sleep, and he stays up around the sky’s cycle, watching the sun go up and down again and it becomes the same thing. Things happen in the sky at night, things he doesn’t know the ins and outs of, that look big and like they are there for him, and him alone.

9

On their wedding night, Carol gives him a rubber chicken and a bottle of rum and they get in the truck half-cut and make it out to the beach. Too drunk to even try to fuck they just talk until the sand fleas get to them, and then they run screaming into the waveless sea. He holds her hands in case she would be swept away from him.

10

And then one night he makes a mess of a shot and the roo comes down kicking and thrashing. By the time he gets to it in the dark, he thinks it’s dead, but it has one kick left in it, which gets him in the gut and breaks the skin, makes him piss blood for days. He stays in his truck those nights, waiting for things to heal up. It doesn’t occur to him to drive out, to get to a hospital. He is tougher than that, like the old man — lost and alone in the jungle, no torch for him, no glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. And he thinks of his ungrateful brother and how he had learned that day not to leave bait out; hadn’t he kept it in the shade since then?

11

He is woken when the sun is still high in the sky by a car horn and someone calling his name. It’s his brother, come looking for him, and Bobby

feels everything falling away. “You have to come home now,” his brother says, and Bobby gets the feeling if he doesn’t go with him he’ll be knocked on the head, fettered and carried out.

He thinks of his brother caught in the lamp light and a countdown starts in his head but he comes back to himself and allows his brother to escort him home. His brother drives his truck, his perfect wife and kids in their own, just behind them, wide-eyed in the rear-view mirror. If his brother tries to start a conversation, Bobby doesn’t hear it. They drive the whole way with the windows open.

His mother greets him at the door with tears. Carol looks at him like he’s something to be afraid of. He’s thin, yes, his eyes are a little sunken from looking through the trees in the dark. There’s the stink from those fly-blown tails, which she tells him has got into the grain of his skin. The baby has grown, he eats soft things now, bananas, can’t get enough of bananas, and he sucks on a mango stone until the thing is bald. He cries less, and just stares hard at Bobby when he picks him up, stares like he’s waiting for the answer to a question he put to him fair and square.

Before he goes, his brother says, “I can get you work at the mine — be a salary and a bungalow — got to be better for Carol and the kid than this?”

It’s hard to sleep at night in this place where he doesn’t own the ground and the sky. He hears his mother turn over in her sleep, the springs groan, she talks to herself. “Clary, don’t spill oil all over the table. Don’t you touch that, Bob.”

Carol stares at the ceiling so as not to look at him, disappearing herself into the plaster, willing herself into another life.

“I can’t just wait for your mother to die, Bob.” The boy is asleep on her chest. He doesn’t know anything about his father — not who he is, not why he’s there. Sometimes Bobby catches him staring at him from his mother’s lap, one hand up Carol’s shirt fiddling away with her nipple. It can feel like a deliberate baiting sometimes, and Bobby has to take himself off and have a breather on the back veranda.

He misses those nights when they danced into his bullets, and he misses cutting through the gristle and bone of those thick tails, right at the root, so that the men back at the station would see the size of the ones he went for, taller than him, wider, certainly. The looks he got when he climbed down and uncovered the stinking wreck of his tray. He saw envy in those men’s faces, he saw that they wanted the night and the power and the time all of their own.

12

One hot afternoon, Bobby watches his mother hang out washing while his son passes her the pegs. Carol is smoking out the front, reading through the paper and circling the jobs she reckons he could go for. She doesn’t know that he has tried already. He’d rather she thought of him as a layabout than someone people turned away. He isn’t built to work with people or even, he sees now that his son has started forming his first words, to be around people. People and their need to talk things through, to voice opinions. It had been what always set the old man off, the constant chatter, and now here was another voice to add to the soup. He knows this is not the right way to think, but it is there, in him, and he’s never once since left the bait out in the sun.

“To hell with it,” Carol had said that morning, smacking the paper down on her knee, “I’m circling them for myself.”

But he doesn’t believe her. She’s too in love with the boy to leave him alone with his mother all day. It’s like she thinks his mother poisons the boy when she’s not looking. He has a flash of how she was when he was a kid; pretty with red lips and a cigarette hanging from them. Generous with the wooden spoon, passing along a scaleddown version of the beatings the old man gave her, but only ever if him and his brother did wrong by her — pissy bed sheets or the time his brother had taken 50 cents from her saving jar and hid it in his toy box. There was a fairness to her that their father didn’t have.

His son drops a peg, says, “Uh-oh.”

His mother puts a hand over her mouth and says, “Oh no!”

The boy cackles and claps his hands. He has a rash around his mouth from eating an orange.

Carol stands behind him, he can smell the smoke on her. She should be the one with the rich brother to stay with. If she knew it had been offered, she’d leave him. Worse, she’d take the boy and go and stay with them.

The boy looks up behind Bobby at Carol and smiles. “Mam,” he says, and he’s amazed at his own abilities.

When his mother dies they can sell the house, he can set them up and leave them to it.

His mother sniffs hard at Carol. “The baby needs changing,” she says.

13

Later, much later, when the kid is grown up and gone off with a girlfriend pregnant, Carol long ago given up, fat and gone anyway, and his mother finally dead, Bobby works on a mine, just him and a digger with a large and rusted claw. He sold up his mum’s house, bought the mine for a song with enough left over to install a bungalow, get electricity and water sorted out, though it’s something he’s never got around to.

After three years of pulling up creek banks, of sifting through the dust and mud, of knowing that the next bowlful of earth will have gold in it, the engine of his digger gets a blockage. He loses a whole day siphoning off the diesel. He feeds a length of rubber hose down into the fuel chamber, and sucks, harder than he knows he should, but time is wasting, and the diesel comes chugging out into his mouth and before he can spit he’s taken a bellyful, and he’s fighting to breathe.

He is sick all into the night, lying next to his digger, and he wakes in the sun with peeling cramps in his gut and his eyes bleeding and a white slime coming out his nose, streaked with red. He’s dying. He’s dying for a week and for the whole of that week he is back in the darkness, with the old man, the rubber chicken and the rifle in his arms and the shining red of those eyes looking right at him, the nightjars and the buzz of insects that whine by his ear, never biting him because he is part of the earth.

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