The Narrow Road to the Deep North(119)

In February 1967 Ella planned a week’s holiday in Tasmania with the children at the home of her sister, who had recently moved there with her husband. These planned holidays, conceived and booked without Dorrigo’s involvement, under the pretence of being a high point of their shared lives, were rather the last vestige of them as a family. Accordingly, Ella created them and he agreed to them and they all loathed them as a form of corrective punishment known as family time.

On the Saturday they were to fly to Hobart, he thus took a phone call about his brother Tom’s heart attack with mixed feelings. On the one hand he was upset; on the other it gave him good reason to evade at least the first day or two of Tasmania. He managed to get a flight to Sydney that evening, but Tom was too heavily sedated on the Sunday to make much sense. It wasn’t until the Monday that Dorrigo was able to talk at some length with him.

Tom told him how he had the heart attack that felled him in the Kent Hotel, just as he was about to throw a bull’s eye.

A bull’s eye?

Had it in the bag, Tom said. Bloody embarrassing way to go, though. In a puddle of piss on the floor with a dart in your mitt. Would have preferred somewhere private, like the tomato patch.

His brother seemed unusually talkative, and Dorrigo soon found himself deep in reminiscences about their childhood in Tasmania. Tom was an endless song cycle of Cleveland stories, some of which Dorrigo knew, many of which he had never heard. Doughy Yates’ name came up, and Tom recalled how Doughy would frequently boast that he could outrun the train. Challenged to prove it, he stripped to his long white underpants and raced the Launceston to Hobart express through the peppermint gums and silver wattles of the Cleveland bush. As the train disappeared with a whistle round the bend heading toward Conara Junction, Doughy fell to the ground scratched and exhausted and had to admit defeat.

He was into everything, Doughy, Dorrigo said.

Still dancing solo at eighty-five, Tom said. Collected Leyland P76s at the end. A car you couldn’t give away. Had them bury him lying on his stomach so that everyone would have to kiss his arse forever after. But I always think of him running through the bush in those long white underpants. It’s like life, isn’t it? You think you’ll outrun it, that you’re better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.

They laughed.

You know Doughy was Jackie Maguire’s cousin? Tom said.

Dorrigo didn’t. He spoke fondly about his memories of reading poetry and Aunty Rose’s advice columns for Tom and Jackie Maguire.

Old Jackie, said Tom. Good fella. Best of blokes. Knew the bush. His wife was a blackfella, you know?

For a moment or two Dorrigo couldn’t place Jackie Maguire’s wife at all. Then a long dormant memory—a memory that had in some way troubled and shaped him far more than he knew—pushed its way to the front of his mind. Though he had heard vague tales of aristocratic Spanish blood, one of the traditional Tasmanian alibis, Dorrigo hadn’t known she was an Aborigine, and it led him to questions he had always wanted to ask.

Back then, all those years ago. Just before she vanished. I saw you with her.

Mrs Jackie Maguire?

You were kissing her.

Kissing? Where?

The old chook shed behind St Andrews Inn.

I weren’t kissing.

I saw you both. She was holding you.

I was coming back from shooting rabbits. She was hanging washing. I had nothing doing so I gave her a hand. Looking back, I can see she must have been in a bad way. But it didn’t feel quite that way. We were just talking. Stories of family. People. And I started saying what I hadn’t really said to anyone. Things I had seen. War things. And then it was too much. I remember that. I just started panting and not able to speak properly. Lost. And she held me like a child. That was it, more or less.

You had your face buried in her neck.

I was crying, Dorry. Crying, for Christ’s sake.

What happened to her, Tom? Why did she vanish? I’ve always wondered what became of her.

Old Jackie, he used to knock her about a bit. He loved her, but she was twenty years younger, she wasn’t happy and he knew it. Well, what could you do? Aunty Rose wasn’t going to help you. A good fella, Jackie, but then he’d touch the bottle along and give her what for. That much I knew. But where she went I never knew. Not for many years. Then a letter from her found me here in Sydney. She had gone to Melbourne, then later New Zealand. She married a brickie over in Otago. Said nothing more about him. The letter really said nothing more about anything. There was a note with it from her daughter over there saying her mother had asked her to post this to me after her death. And that was that. I guess because others were going to read it there was no mention of old Jackie, or of her family here in Tassie.