Chapter 4

The coach heading down the coast from Sydney pulled up at the roadhouse at about midday on weekdays, and two in the afternoon on weekends. A second coach came through on Tuesdays and Thursdays at six, pick up only. That coach arrived in Melbourne at five the following morning after making numerous stops along the way. The coach heading up the coast from Melbourne arrived in Cann River at one in the afternoon, three on weekends. On Mondays and Wednesdays, the night coach came through at four in the morning. A little before midday, Pat and Con would be poised ready to receive the Sydney-coach passengers, and shortly after they would try to hide their disappointment as they watched the raggle-taggle of coach-fatigued travellers decant and wander off to the bakery and the general store up the street. Con would angle the sandwich board listing their gourmet pies to catch the eye, but it was rarely enough to lure most, who wanted nothing more than to stretch their legs and see what else the town had to offer, or go and eat a normal pie at the bakery, the preference of regular travellers. Pat and Con enjoyed the patronage of the grannies too old to walk far, the occasional markedly weary traveller, someone with crutches or a limp, a mother eager to shut up her fussing children, and rarely—very rarely—someone lured by the word ‘gourmet’ that was attached to the common-as-flies, great Australian pie. Other than those two coaches, the town, servicing a smattering of farms in the hinterland, relied for its survival on tourists journeying on the highway from here to there, keen to stop midway along a two-hundred mile stretch of wilderness; weary of the thinned-out forest of identical-looking trees, a forest stripped of its magnificence, weary too after battling the logging trucks that seemed to own that stretch of road, a road that went on and on, as though destined to never end. Almost no one came down from the high country to the north, because almost no one lived up there, and those who did were just as likely to head in the opposite direction than come down the mountain, because the road was dirt and known to be treacherous. To the south, some fifteen miles away as the crow flies, and about an hour by car on roads that veered first one way then another, was the coast, replete with a string of wild and dangerous beaches. The whole region had been classified wilderness for good reason. It was largely inaccessible, and it was so far from anywhere significant it might as well fall off the end of the earth altogether and be done with it. There was, to my mind, one feature, one historical note of importance that saved Cann River and its surrounds from desolation. Nearby, was the first land of Eastern Australia James Cook had sighted when he went on his voyage of discovery in 1770. Even if he’d merely named the place Point Hicks and passed right on by. I wish I had. I wish I’d stayed on that coach heading for the city, but when it pulled into the roadhouse that day in the middle of the longest hottest summer there ever was, and the passengers alighted to stretch their legs, I was intrigued by the sense of remoteness that pervaded the place. In that state of fuzzy euphoria that comes with fatigue, I wandered into the roadhouse and saw the sign advertising the need for a waitress. I spoke to the woman behind the counter and within the designated half hour of the coach stop, the driver was pulling out my backpack from the hold, and I was making my way through the roadhouse to the domestic quarters out the back. Three months later, and I was still there. I’d arrived just about penniless and somehow the money I earned in the café, which Pat paid monthly, was always shy of what I was due, never covering much more than the rent and board she charged me. Each pay day, what she handed me, I handed back, save a couple of dollars. Pat kept promising to give me the shortfall in my wages but it never materialised. A rough old room it was too. Windowless walls of concrete blocks painted sky blue. Cuboid, it contained a single, iron-framed bed with a thin, foam mattress and a small, wooden table with a wobbly leg. A tacky print of the Sydney Opera House had been Sellotaped to one wall. The door had no lock and the door handle on the inside didn’t work—someone had tied a straw to the mechanism—which meant I had to leave the door ajar when I was inside, wedged slightly open with a sock, lest I get shut in. I placed my backpack against the door to stop it swinging open in a draught. The room was halfway down a long corridor and opposite was the only bathroom in the place. I never slept well. Neither did Con. He was forever up and down that corridor, visiting the bathroom. At first, I wondered if he had a weak bladder or drank copious amounts of liquid, or even if he had a medical condition. He certainly had something wrong with him other than the peculiar angle of his left foot. It took me a few nights to glean he was going to the bathroom to wash his hands. I observed his hand washing during the day as well. What I originally put down to the contradictory roles of baker and mechanic turned out to be a compulsion. I derived no comfort from the knowledge. For all I knew his hand washing habit was indicative of a much larger complex of traits and tendencies that meant he couldn’t be trusted. My conclusion was reinforced by another aspect of his nocturnal ritual. He would hover in the corridor, outside the bathroom, which was also right outside my bedroom door. I could hear him breathing. A minute or two would pass, sometimes more. I’d be lying on my narrow creaky bed, rigid, holding my own breath, alert as prey. Then I’d hear his footsteps head off and his bedroom door clunk shut. After these episodes, it would take me a long time to get to sleep and sometimes I found I was still awake when he tramped back up the corridor to repeat the whole ritual. Once, I don’t think I slept at all, and counted to six the number of times he got up. I wanted to tell Pat, but I couldn’t. Pat wasn’t the type of woman to take lightly a criticism of her son, and there was no way of broaching the issue without making him sound like a creep. Instead, I succumbed to quiet desperation, made worse through lack of sleep. I existed in a fog of exhaustion, my movements disconnected from my awareness. Not even Pat’s incessant carping had much impact. Earlier that April day, she’d had me on my hands and knees scrubbing the grout between the kitchen floor tiles. Then she had me scrubbing out the public lavatories which according to her had to be kept lickable clean. I thought one day she’d barge in and make me glide my tongue around the inside of a toilet bowl just to prove to her I had faith in my own work, but she never did. Really, I was her scrubber. That’s all I did. I scrubbed the tables, the counter, the milk-shake maker and the pie warmer. In the kitchen, I did the dishes. I cleaned the grill and the chipper. I cleaned up the awful mess Con left behind him when he made his pies; the flour encrusted bench, the bloodied knives and chopping boards, the saucepans thick with the remains of his fillings, encrusted on the bottom and congealed about the rim, the dollops set hard on the stovetop, the oven splatters from filling overspill, and the pastry he’d managed to grind into the floor. I was never allowed in the kitchen when Con was making those pies. Pat said it made him self-conscious. I was ushered in when the last tray of cooked pies was cooling on a wire rack. I was forced to function in the unappetising stink of it. As I scrubbed, I would dream of home, back in Oxford, of my parents and my younger brother, Timothy. Of my heady university days reading English literature, the lectures, the seminars, the long meandering essays. I recalled my bicycle, English pubs and warm beer in quaint Cotswold villages. Cosy memories of happy days, one endless balmy summer in my imagining. The longer I remained trapped at the roadhouse, the rosier my memories, the more intense the homesickness. I would curse the day I decided to spend the money I’d saved working in an Oxford bookstore on a return ticket to Sydney. I’d graduated and I wanted to see the world. My parents forbade me to go to India, South America, Africa, or the Middle East. In fact, anywhere I came up with was too dangerous for them, other than Australia. Nothing untoward could possibly happen to me in such a sensible country, so I secured a working holiday visa and took off. The day was hot, and the bus heading down the coast from Sydney pulled in five minutes early. Con hadn’t put out the sandwich board. He was on the forecourt serving petrol. Pat marched in from the kitchen as if by instinct, surveyed the situation and, in that gruff manner of hers said, ‘Get and put out the pie board.’ I stuffed the rag that had become an extension of my hand in the pocket of my apron and heaved the hinged board outside and set it down angled at the bus, in time for the few passengers, couples mostly, to give it a cursory glance on their way up the street. I watched a mother drag her two children to my pristine toilets, and an elderly man pause on the forecourt, scan the sandwich board and make up his mind to go inside. Behind him, a lanky and ghostly pale young man who, despite the heat, wore a beanie on his head, scrutinised the setting, taking a special interest in the trees. It was a gesture that seemed odd to me, for the trees all looked the same, forming a dense curtain around the town. The old man had made it to the sandwich board before the young man followed on behind, taking long, yet careful strides. I went and held open the door. They both entered together, the young man dodging past the old and heading straight to Pat behind the counter. He attempted to place an order of a steak pie, which was spelt ‘stake’ because Con had written up that section of the board and Pat wouldn’t countenance changing it. Curious, I reached into my apron and took out my rag and wiped down the already clean tables nearby. ‘There’s no steak,’ Pat said. There was almost never any steak. The man looked disappointed. ‘How about the hunter?’ Pat said. ‘You got the venison.’ ‘Yep.’ ‘I’ll have that.’ ‘Chips?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Sauce?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Sauce, of course,’ she repeated. Pat liked to say ‘sauce, of course,’ although she had no idea about such things as assonance and alliteration. She had a thing about that sauce. She made it herself out of the tomatoes she grew, and it won first prize every year in the local agricultural show. Her awards were thumb tacked to the high shelving behind the counter. The sauce was sweet and tangy and intense, obliterating every other flavour on the palate, effectively extinguishing the taste, both immediate and residual, of Con’s pies. He hadn’t a clue because he was allergic to tomatoes. The power of her sauce was Pat’s secret, her way of undermining her son, even as she praised his pies to the hilt, and told everyone he was a master baker. She would never hear a bad word said about his pies. The young man took his plate of pie and sauce to the table nearest the door, leaving the old man to place his order of venison pie with chips and sauce, along with a flat white coffee. He rambled on to Pat in a low drawl on how travelling made him ravenous and there was still a long way to go to reach the city, before she interrupted and told him to find a table. The young man caught my eye and beckoned me over. He asked for some salt and pepper. I fetched a cruet set from another table. As I set it down, I took in his face, my eyes settling on the long scar running up the edge of his cheek and emerging on the other side of his beanie, on his forehead above his right ear. It was fresh-looking, red, and I thought perhaps he’d been in a road accident. His hands trembled as he doused his pie. He looked up at me and asked for a glass of water. When I returned with it, we chatted. The way he spoke surprised me. His voice was soft, educated, the words he chose sophisticated. His name was Pete. He had large, winsome blue eyes set in a smooth, hairless, almost pretty face, despite the pallor and the scar. His mouth was full, the lower lip protruding in a slight pout. If it hadn’t been for the deep timbre of his voice, he might have been mistaken for a flat-chested woman. I asked him where he was heading, and he said he was waiting for a lift to take him to the lighthouse. I knew about the lighthouse at Point Hicks, but I hadn’t been. What was he planning to do there? I thought perhaps he had a job although he looked in no fit state to work. He told me his friend and lighthouse keeper, Simon, needed to spend a couple of weeks in the city at short notice, and had been desperate to find someone to mind the lighthouse while he was away. But Pete said he was really going there to convalesce. I didn’t like to ask what was wrong. I wished him a speedy recovery and left him to his pie. I watched him from behind the counter as he battled into the pie crust, as if the effort of bringing his knife to bear on the pastry were too much. In the end, he stabbed the centre with a fork and proceeded to eat out the contents, leaving the crust untouched. After that he sat gazing out the window and sipping his water. I went and retrieved his plate and that was when he told me he was waiting for Simon to pick him up. He was still there many hours later when a car coasted onto the forecourt, coming to a halt at a weird angle and blocking the exit. I thought it might have been the lighthouse keeper, Simon, but a woman got out and marched past the bowsers on her way inside. She looked flustered. She was middle aged, of ordinary appearance, plump about the torso; the sort of woman who’d made a career out of sitting at a desk. She hadn’t seen me on my haunches wiping the floor under a table, but I disliked her on sight. Leaving Pat to enjoy the Joan Baez she’d put on the jukebox, I snuck out to the lavatories to give them one last clean before locking them up for the night.