Shearers' Motel Read Free Page A

said Alastair.
    As the life he knew dropped away behind him, he knew he wasn’t really doing this for money, but was cutting loose, pissing off, piling on the logs, fanning a conflagration. Money was just something that could be talked about (like melons were something that could be talked about).
    The feeling he had when he closed the gate of the home paddock seemed a reason in itself. The heart of starlings settled in their tattered pines as if sucked down by a magnetic force. He made his way down the long dirt track, out to the steaming black tarmac of the King’s Highway. The feeling made him come alive — he was being drawn to half-remembered places. Grasshoppers slapped the windscreen. The balding tyres twanged. The speeding cylinders hissed like a bow wave cleaving a sea. He had an image of ruin in his mind, as if he would be travelling into, and through, the sun. The names of the towns at the far end of the road he took — Nyngan, Byrock, Bourke, Fords Bridge, Yantabulla, Hungerford — rose towards him from a time in his childhood when he first became aware of change and separation in his life. He had lived out west as a boy, and had said to his mother, ‘If I die in Bourke, don’t bury me there’.
    Alastair had said: ‘That’s where you’ll get your start’.
    Â 
    Arrived at Leopardwood Downs Station he knew without being told, without even looking (though he looked), that he came from the same background, had attended the same schools, had existed within the same social network since childhood as the people who ran this place. He wanted them to see that, then wanted to watch himself turning invisible against this background of his choosing. Then he would be able to say, I remember who I am. And I choose what happens next .
    Â 
    He walked back to the truck feeling like first arrival on the scene after a flying saucer attack. Bertram Junior’s telephoned directions had been exact till now: for the last twenty kilometres follow the graded track leading straight to the homestead. Near the house was a cluster of outbuildings — a corrugated iron fuel shed, a machinery shed, and a vehicle shed standing on oilstained, ochrecoloured sand — but no shearing shed. He shaded his eyes and scanned the horizon. Not even a glimmer of galvanised iron showed through the distant trees.
    He gave the homestead a last try, walking around the other side past a neat, wirescreened meat house, and along the front where recently planted bottlebrush and juvenile orange trees battled the full blast of heat. The front was never the way you entered in the country. The back was always the front.
    This homestead was a modular house. It would have been shipped up on the back of a semitrailer, bolted together, and wrapped around with gauzed verandahs to give it an illusion of spaciousness. It was raised on half-metre-high concrete blocks, with a Zincalum roofline serving fibreglass rainwater tanks. A struggle was being lost to make the yard an oasis. The place to shelter that day would have been an inside bedroom, shades drawn, doors closed against grit and glare. An air conditioner was running. Maybe someone was in there now, ignoring his shout, leafing through another book of a kind he wouldn’texpect to find here, unless there was a student around, an art student maybe. They were the ones who read up on symbols, their teachers telling them to look around behind things in order to escape the literal three-dimensional world. But they shouldn’t need to be told that here in the bush.
    It was the day before shearing and he supposed that all available hands would be down at the shed: men, boys, women, girls, dogs — whoever. But where was the shed?
    He headed off along a station track, following deep, slithery wheel-ruts into a paddock of bleached grass, where kangaroos lounged in clumps of shade. Raised on elbows, they gazed at him like sunbathers. After a couple of kilometres