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FARINA, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
April 1914
Something about this moment felt unnerving to Tom Catchlove. It was as though the world around him was physically quietening down in readiness. Tom couldn’t pinpoint why. He glanced again through the binoculars around his neck but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He could sense a strange, almost sinister frisson across the desert landscape this morning, and it was making his skin crawl.
Six feet up on one of the twisted limbs of an ancient coolabah tree on the edge of the waterhole, ten-year-old Tom sat, legs swinging as he chewed on some ruby-coloured saltbush berries. They were like gleaming jewels in the parched wilderness and the citrussy explosion on his tongue as each tiny berry popped made his mouth water and eyes squint. He was being careful not to spill the scarlet juice on his shirt; he didn’t want to create more work for his mother.
He batted away the annoying, sticky-footed flies that always tried to get into his eyes and looked up through the tree into the depthless vault of the sky – his upside-down sea. The colour lightened towards the horizon but directly above it was such a brilliant Egyptian blue that he could pick out each gumleaf with precision against it. His mother, Moira, had taught him that while Nature had created the many hues of the sky, the ancient Egyptians had reproduced this particular one for their art by mixing limestone with azurite.
‘Azurite contains copper. They’d heat it, Tom, and turn it into glass that would then be crushed and combined with egg whites to create a glaze the colour of this perfect Australian autumn sky, untouched by clouds.’
Learning this sort of random fact was all part of his education, she’d assure him, and although Tom wasn’t convinced it would be handy for his inevitable future on a sheep station, his enquiring mind enjoyed expanding itself. Moira had plenty to share from her private school education in Adelaide and her travels in Europe.
He heard the screech of a kite in the distance. It was hovering, on the hunt. The waterhole had been filled with some welcome and abundant spring rains, so the small creatures were plentiful, the creeks were running, and wildflowers had pushed through formerly parched wilderness. The sound of the lapping Paradise Creek wouldn’t last, though. It was a transient awakening, a tease that reminded the families of pioneers why their forebears had thought this land would reward them. But that had been a false hope; it could not reward them in agriculture. It was a tough enough landscape that only the hardiest creatures like sheep could survive, and even they needed so much help.
The rains had barely finished and already the waterhole was no longer deep enough to swim in, but Tom had enjoyed a week of joy playing in it. Water was so elusive in their lives out here that they usually had to fetch and carry it from the railhead in shippers and then be strict about its use. It would be gone – drained, evaporated, drunk away – in a week or so, he guessed, but for now the waterhole was populated with all the birds he liked to spot and identify. This morning alone he’d seen cheeky willy wagtails, honeyeaters, variegated wrens, even doves. And then the raptors had arrived, hunting for the rabbits that he tried to trap for his mother to vary their daily diet of mutton. There were always crows around, of course, making their raspy caws. Ever observant, cunning crows.
They were not so talkative today. Odd.
He didn’t want to miss the approach of the train into Farina this morning. Its erratic arrival fuelled his dreams that there was more to life than this lonely existence; the train often felt like a shiny treat in his isolated life. He’d look for its billowing steam in the distance from his vantage and leap down to hurtle across the desert towards the rail tracks. Racing to be near the lines before it passed was part of the fun and the challenge. It was over a mile from the waterhole, and he had to skip over cottonbush and watch out for slithering creatures but never drop his speed so he could arrive out of breath but in time to wave to the driver. The blast of air that would hit him as the train thundered past knocked all the last breath out of him. It always felt exciting. He would listen to the piercing sound of metal on metal as the train wound its way to the siding, where a different sort of train, a line of camels, would be waiting. There, the shippers would load up the camels with water and then their Afghan handlers would take their camel train on to far-flung parts of this enormous sheep station.
One million square miles, Vern Catchlove, Tom’s father, had told him with an awed sigh. Tom had been impressed – he knew how to write that number and it had an awful lot of noughts in it. He understood that the station was enormous. Tom remembered how he had looked at his mother and seen only misery at his father’s words. Why was she here? Why was she married to his father, a cattle drover, gone for months at a time?
He’d asked her once, a couple of years ago. She’d simply shrugged.
‘Your father made me feel special, Tom, at a time when I needed to feel . . . something,’ she said, unable to find the right word, it seemed. ‘He wasn’t who my family chose. He is who I chose.’
It had sounded too complex and vague a notion to press for further understanding. He’d not asked again.
He’d been born in January on a day the mercury had reached one hundred and seventeen degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, his mother told him.
‘You came quickly, Tom. The town’s midwife, Mrs Moffatt, said I needed to be grateful for that and not groan about the heat.’ She had tousled his hair with affection. ‘You’ve always been an easy, cooperative boy and I’m still grateful to you for it.’
He smiled at that fond memory, that and her horror that he’d eaten goanna with a couple of the local Aboriginal families. Their children were his friends but living out here on the station, he saw them rarely. Some of the Afghan children were his friends too and he loved to see the handsome Gool Mahomet, who had moved to their region from Afghanistan. Moira had shown him on a world map where that was, and Tom had stared at all the countries around the world as she pointed, the great continents picked out in pastel colours against the pale seas. He’d squinted at Afghanistan, shaped like a sausage and nestling among romantic-sounding places like Tehran in Persia, Tashkent, Samarkand, Peshawar and the Khyber Pass.
Gool had been born in a city called Kabul before he travelled to central Australia and into South Australia to bring all his experience as a cameleer to their region. Tom always thought Gool was magnificent, sitting astride his tall charger. He wore a turban and had a strong profile with his long, straight nose, blue eyes and fair complexion. His beard was black and woolly. This man, of high caste in his country, had married a woman from Paris of all places, making him quite the celebrity. Tom had heard a number of rumours about this woman: everything from her being a governess in the Goldfields, to a prostitute in Kalgoorlie.
They were a colourful couple, but Gool was also the leader of the Afghans who lived on what was known as Afghan Hill in a camp not far east of the main town. It wasn’t often that Tom spoke to the wise man of the Afghans, but on the rare occasion he did, he had smelled chlorodyne on Gool’s breath; all the Afghan men seemed to sip it from blue bottles. His mother had said it was medicine but Tom suspected it had something else in it.
He realised he’d become lost in his thoughts and time had slipped by. The train was late today. It often was. He’d enquired with the guards about the curious timetable and the response was, ‘We get here when we get here,’ which seemed to amuse the adults around him. For Tom Catchlove, though, the response made no sense. He liked precision. Finding order helped him to make sense of his world that felt increasingly disordered as he grew and his father stayed away for longer periods.
The need for accuracy certainly wasn’t a trait of his father, who was unreliable at best; instead, Tom’s mother said he got it from her family, the Darnells, although he’d not met any of them to verify her claim. Now her mind was blurry, always distracted. This lack of sharpness from the woman who had given each day of the week a specific title, from wash day to bake day, had him troubled. Now she had become as unreliable as his father – just in a different way.
Tom returned from his musings, flicking at the flies and becoming aware of the new and sudden silence.
Something was not right. All the birds who should have been singing and flitting about had become still. The kite had disappeared too. Did they all know something he didn’t? Was he imagining their silence or was this sense of being unnerved to do with his mother’s ‘turns’? They were happening more regularly now – she was ill. The adults who came through their lives referred to it as ‘her nerves’ and at ten he had no idea what that actually meant, but he knew it was more about his father’s absence than his own presence.
He didn’t know how to help her and all he could do when she was lost in that silent, staring broodiness she slipped into was to take her hand and hold it in his lap. They might sit like that for hours, occasionally through a night, and then at daybreak she’d surface from the mire of whatever it was that sucked her down into its depths. She’d look at him as if recognising him again and ask him how he was and shouldn’t they be getting some food organised, or was it time to feed the horse?
Tom shouldered a lot of chores and did his best to be the man around the house, as Vern had instructed him to be when he had left. He tried to remember all the smaller tasks too that his mother was becoming forgetful over, like moistening the clay pot, in which they kept their butter. In summer, the pot was stored in the fireplace where it was cool. He kept the lanterns filled with kerosene and he kept a watchful eye on the slightly temperamental Coolgardie drip safe to make sure it was working, so his mother could rely on her precious food remaining cool. He helped her to grow onions and potatoes, which were their mainstay of vegetables unless they could be treated to some carrots and the like when the train came in. When it did, the kids, like Tom, knew to grab a spoon, plate and a copper penny because they could buy a big scoop of delicious vanilla ice cream, the treat of the gods as far as Tom was concerned.
His father had now been away for eight weeks. Tom knew it was that long because he had diligently counted off the days, as they turned to weeks, on a sheet of butcher’s paper. As the sun slipped away each evening, his job was to light the lamps that he and his mother would eat by. He’d gaze at the homemade calendar that appeared gloomier for its seemingly endless rows of crosses in the low, flickering light.
Moira didn’t always eat but Tom would encourage her, keeping up a one-sided conversation, making sure she could hear the gentle clatter of his fork against his plate. She insisted they eat from china crockery and observe good manners, and Tom rather liked the unexpected pleasure of elegance it leant to their meagre, lamplit suppers and humble surrounds. His once statuesque mother had become five and a half feet of bones encased in fragile flesh, in stark contrast to how she looked in the two photographs they had of her life before Vern Catchlove. Her shoulders poked out squarely and her elbows formed triangles when in motion. While he enjoyed a rare hug from her, they were fleeting, angular; he could feel the ridges of her ribs like the washboard in the laundry when he pressed his face against her.
But recently he’d noticed her body was changing – becoming plumper. He couldn’t understand it because she ate so little . . . and she seemed constantly fatigued. He often heard her throwing up outside. He hadn’t wanted to ask in case it meant she was ill; what if she was getting ready to blow up and explode as he’d seen with some dead, bloated animals? But her new shape had got the better of him the night before last.
