Simpson Returns Read online

  About the Book

  Ninety years after they were thought to have died heroically in the Great War, the stretcher-bearer Simpson and his donkey journey through country Victoria, performing minor miracles and surviving on offerings left at war memorials. They are making their twenty-ninth, and perhaps final, attempt to find the country’s famed Inland Sea.

  On the road north from Melbourne, Simpson and his weary donkey encounter a broke single mother, a suicidal Vietnam veteran, a refugee who has lost everything, an abused teenager and a deranged ex-teacher. These are society’s downtrodden, whom Simpson believes can be renewed by the healing waters of the sea.

  In Simpson Returns, Wayne Macauley sticks a pin in the balloon of our national myth. A concise satire of Australian platitudes about fairness and egalitarianism, it is timely, devastating and witheringly funny.

  For Graham Henderson, who gave me the goad.

  …lowly, and riding upon an ass…

  ZECHARIAH 9:9

  NOTE

  The following events are assumed to have taken place over the course of roughly six weeks in the early part of 2003.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  1 THE SITUATION EXPLAINED

  2 THE RUINED WOMAN

  3 AN UNFORTUNATE LIFE

  4 THE JOLLYLESS REFUGEE

  5 THE QUIET GIRL

  6 THE FALLEN TEACHER

  7 THE DESERT AND THE END

  EXTRACT FROM SOME TESTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ALSO BY WAYNE MACAULEY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  THE SITUATION EXPLAINED

  I, Simpson, and my donkey, Murphy, eighty-eight years resurrected, are still on the road, still together, still looking for the Inland Sea. This trip looks like our last. Fair weather the barometer said, then two days out of Melbourne it rained. We were a little short of Diggers Rest, on the Toolern Vale road. It came upon us quickly, boiling black clouds on the western horizon and a great blast of wind from the south. Murphy got bogged in a roadside ditch and I could not get him out. He squawked, irascibly, each time I tugged at his rein and for one terrible moment I thought he was giving up on me and wanted to go home. But I got him out in the end. That night as he slept I saw the shiver coursing through his flanks and knew he had caught cold. The next day the shivering grew worse and small rivulets of green snot fell from Murphy’s nostrils. I have plied him with all possible cures but he takes them reluctantly; since north of Crowlands I’ve carried the pannier bags myself. I still hope to make the Sunset Country before the summer ends—perhaps the dry air there will put him back on his feet? All the best laid plans.

  He’s a good animal, I can’t deny it, a little on the mulish side at times but old enough for me to forgive him his irritating ways. We’ve been through a lot together, Murphy and I, but the beast has stuck by me where many other donkeys and no doubt many more humans would have given up years ago. He’s from India, originally. What he thinks of our enterprise, I cannot say: not even I, his lifelong companion, can penetrate that inscrutable look. Perhaps he simply has nowhere else to go, nothing else to do: better a futile journey than a more futile staying at home. I’ve studied his face often these past few days for a sign of his present thinking but the look is more inscrutable than ever. Can anyone understand a donkey, what goes on in a donkey’s mind? I am more qualified than most, but no wiser than a century ago.

  This is our twenty-ninth attempt; the other twenty-eight, I don’t mind saying, have been somewhat less than successful. We have never got out of the state of Victoria. Last time it was the wasps—Murphy has a fear of wasps, among other things, and in attempting to clear a path through them he caught my chin with his hoof. I could not eat for days. That was just past Burnside. Bad luck is often like bad weather, I find: one minute you’re free of it, the next it’s falling on top of your head. We returned again to Mrs Fowler’s place in Richmond with our tails between our legs. Mrs Fowler’s daughter asks no questions; the gate to the back lane is always open, as with her dear mother before her. When we wake in the morning fresh straw is waiting outside the stable door and a small breakfast has been prepared. Most of the stables in that street are gone now, converted to garages and studios, but ours has been kept more or less unchanged since the day we first moved in. It’s comforting to know that blood ties still run deep and old debts are still dutifully discharged. Apparently I had done some good turn for the widow Fowler’s husband: the man with the donkey, he said, in his last letter to her, be sure you repay the debt.

  The daughter’s name is June. Her husband suffers me stoically. On my triennial visits ‘home’ he studiously avoids the backyard and lets his wife attend to our needs. Are the man and the donkey back again? he asks, looking out through the kitchen window with a smile. He doesn’t see us, of course, but through her silences he reads our presence. I try to keep out of their way and do what I can not to overstay my welcome. She never fusses about us too much, though; it is enough for her that she keeps the promise, in deference to the father she never knew. She was conceived on the eve of Mr Fowler’s sailing and is now in her eighty-ninth year. We are all getting old. If this trip should somehow prove successful I hope she will be the first to profit from it.

  I wasn’t always looking for the Inland Sea. Helpmate to the dying, that was the lot I was burdened with and one which (with no false modesty) brought me some measure of fame and a steady supply of good-quality cigarettes in those earlier, far-off days. I still wear the Red Cross armband, threadbare now with age. We brought the bloodied racks of bodies back to the hospital tent, drank what little hospital brandy we could find, then journeyed out into the terrible cacophony again. A man and his donkey. I have a photograph of us somewhere, in my pannier bags I think: me a rough-headed youth smiling a smile that could almost be a grimace, Murphy looking disdainfully for God knows what reason at my foot. That was the Great War, they called it the Great War, and I’m sure it was great for some, but somehow the greatness of it got past Murphy and me and we had to content ourselves with the trivialities of blood and broken limbs.

  Then one day down at the clearing station a few weeks in a wounded soldier with half his guts missing called me over to his bed. Lasseter was his name. He said he’d heard of the work I was doing, that I was the one man here who could not afford to be lost. From inside his pocket he took out a vial, a small glass vial, with a clear liquid, water, inside. Rub a little on your forehead, he said, if ever you get in trouble—I could use it myself but I’m past caring, I’ve seen enough these last few days to know that life is not worth living. A good man. I hung the vial on a string around my neck and set off into the maelstrom again. When I came back later that day, Lasseter’s stretcher was empty.

  Yes, they were strange days, the days of war. If they taught us nothing else they taught us that hate does not get you far in this world. All those boys, they all hated as best they could, sent hatred down the barrels of their guns in the direction of Johnny Turk, but for all their hating they could not win, they would not win, they were still losers, they lost. From their tents on the beaches the generals barked and asked couldn’t we smell that stinking paprika and garlic coming off those filthy Ottomans and didn’t we want to drive our bayonets through their dirty olive skins—yet we could smell nothing but our own cordite and blood. I walked through Johnny Turk’s hellfire, asking to be hit. I believed the meek would inherit the earth, no matter what state the earth was in once the unmeek had finished with it. I stood for crucifixion, the others for rough Roman justice. One morning on my way back down Shrapnel Gully I took a sniper’s bullet through the heart. I lay where I fell, gazing up at Mur
phy braying, until in the blind panic that only death’s nearness can bring I uncorked the vial and took a swig.

  I awoke three days later in a hospital ship on my way to the island of Lemnos; Murphy, they said, was safely below. The padre stroked his chin: this was something outside his parish. I pleaded with him not to send us back—I’ll make a better hero back home, I said, if they hear I was killed in action. The padre creased his forehead. He wasn’t going to believe in the Resurrection, not this time round anyway, it would only give him trouble in the long run. He would try to bury us, if not actually then figuratively, and move on to other things. When we docked at Lemnos he got a job for us carting water for the monks in the monastery up on the hill. For this we got bread, wine and board and a life of which few ex-servicemen could boast, and in this Aegean idyll we lived out the final years of the war while over on the Peninsula the blood of thousands stained the dirt.

  We came home at war’s end on the steamer Medic and docked at Melbourne, where the Spanish influenza pandemic was at that time raging. I begged some work from the Sisters of Mercy, carting influenza victims from the backstreet slums at tuppence on delivery, but truth to say my heart wasn’t really in it. I had lost the necessary compassion, I think, to return to my old line of work.

  And the Inland Sea? What drove me to that? I who could have lived untroubled with Murphy in that warm stable in Richmond until the last gene in the Fowler line was extinguished? I never really knew what happened that day in Shrapnel Gully, except that age had not seemed to weary me since, nor it seemed my donkey. Then one morning in the kitchen, shortly after our arrival, the widow Fowler cut her finger. In taking her hand to look at the damage I must have brushed against the wound. The bleeding stopped, and the cut closed over. A miracle—it was only then that I grasped the full extent of the vial’s power. The news spread, and for the next few years I paid my way, performing little healing tricks for those who sought me out. Only those who believed were cured, for it was only those who believed who could be certain of my existence. My cures were not grand by any means—I could close a cut finger or turn back a common cold—and my fees were correspondingly small. But I had landed on my feet, and while all the returned soldiers wandered the streets of Melbourne, prematurely aged, with the spectre of death and suffering in their eyes, I slept snug and warm in Mrs Fowler’s stable with barely a grey hair on my head.

  Then one day in the summer of 1928, a man came knocking on my door. A sick-looking man, pale and wasted, with a hunted look in his eye. It was Lasseter, the wounded soldier. He’d survived, minus most of his intestine and bowel. I could do nothing for him. But didn’t I still have the vial? he asked. I’d kept it, of course, on the string around my neck, but the contents were long since gone. It’s here, I said, pulling it out. But the water, he asked, the water inside? I turned to Murphy; Murphy bowed his head. I looked at the ceiling, then bowed my head too. Lasseter held his in his hands.

  Seventy-five years: it’s a long time looking, by anyone’s estimation. Lasseter is long since dead. But as Mrs Fowler dispatched her duty to me so I will mine to him. Don’t worry, I had said (how easily said!), I will fill the vial again. He gave me the map with the details on it but I have trouble reading it now. My eyesight is failing, my bones have started to creak, my healing powers are not what they were. But if twenty-eight failed attempts so far have given us little cause for optimism, still, we must go on. We follow the vast network of fissures and gullies inland, leaning on charity where we must, paying our way where we can. In the pannier bags I carry herbs, plant extracts, dried animal parts, healing stones, all the little tricks I’ve picked up along the way. In the vial I keep an Ayurvedic gem, the locust egg that a Talmudist gave me, a sliver of deer’s antler that I got from a Chinese. I draw on the haberdashery of knowledge I have accumulated, from people I’ve talked to and books I’ve read, and fill in the gaps extempore. I mark my face and utter ritual incantations of my own invention; I crush crusty snail shells with a mortar and pestle and keep the dust in a Vegemite jar. But the physician cannot heal himself. My bones are cold in the marrow, my heart speaks to me out of tune. I go to the memorials where the heave offerings are left: tinned food, biscuits, brandy, cigarettes. I stand at the back door of a country pub at closing time and beg for a bottle and a carrot for Murphy: Lest we forget, I say. The farmers dutifully whip around among themselves and the publican returns with my booty wrapped up in a brown paper bag. I accept it graciously—You will be blessed with many children, I say, in the fullness of time—and disappear again into the night to rejoin Murphy at our camp on the outskirts where beside a fire of broken fence palings and pallets I drink. Murphy says nothing, but behind his supposedly vacant eyes I’m sure I see a look of reproach. We are on our way to the Sunset Country, I say, then north, to the Inland Sea. But he is little reassured. He stands removed, chewing on his withered carrot, his eyes deliberately averted to the ground. By God he is an obstinate beast.

  2

  THE RUINED WOMAN

  We left Fowlers’ that early March morning with the barometer fair and the wind from the north, skirted the city on the river side and crossed the Maribyrnong by Shepherd Bridge. Through the bluestone lanes of Footscray and out into the wilds of Footscray West my plan was, as always (my twenty-ninth attempt!), to pick up the Kororoit Creek past Brooklyn and let it guide us windingly north across the black soil plains.

  We made first camp as evening fell behind the tennis courts in Deer Park. The plaque there is set in a basalt boulder on a patch of lawn under a tree, a favourite stopping place. The locals here are mostly kind. In the lee of the rock they had left a can of baked beans, one of pressed meat and six miniature bottles of Remy. This is where last trip I cured the young addict Ekrem Bata: estranged from his parents, truant from school, no job and no government help, he had been robbing houses until one day in an insensible state he’d left his girlfriend inside and run. She was given a bond but would have no more to do with the traitor. Ekrem went downhill. I found him shivering under a streetlight; the park was otherwise quiet. Oh Jack, he said. His eyes when I first pulled back the lids looked to have closed their apertures forever: they would admit light no more. But look and you will see something stirring: a flicker of life, a hint of goodness, of something sadly lost. Are you all right? I asked. Hmvsh, said Ekrem Bata. Take this and put it over you, I said. I removed that other, disingenuous blanket, and replaced it with the warm blanket of love. To the plaza or your girlfriend’s? My girlfriend’s, please, said Ekrem Bata. I whistled Murphy up. The going was easy. Along the way I administered my potions, softened the hard edges of his horrors with a velvet poultice to the heart. We halted on the footpath outside his girlfriend’s house in Sunshine. His bowels loosened by all this exercise, Murphy decided now was the time to shit. Go, I said: Be brave. I watched Ekrem walk up the drive. The girlfriend answered, and in an instant she had draped his neck and shoulders with her arms.

  I collected my things from the lee of the rock, tethered Murphy where he could get at the grass, and in the gathering darkness I opened and ate the beans. Later that evening a boy came by on a bike and held out a hamper for me. It’s from me dad, he said. His hand was trembling: the kid’s father had warned him what to expect but I was still a frightful sight. The one who fell off the scaffold, he said. Ah yes, I said, remembering—I wanted to talk, the wisdom of the ancients, but the frightened boy was already gone.

  All went quiet then, save for the cars out on Station Road and, further off, the highway. It’s my lot to be set apart. In the days of my Great War heroics I never got any further than that tangle of gullies just beyond the beachhead, in my travels since no further than the dry creek beds and back roads of country Victoria. Will I always move in the hollows, the defiles and ravines? But even on my bad days I still see it, this Inland Sea of mine, its shimmering surface, its unfathomable depths, and can feel it drawing me to its bosom. It will let me in, I think, like from where Adam and Eve were put out; the gates will
open, music will play and riding Murphy regally I will come into its care. Food and wine will be offered, great tables laid. And it will not just be me who enjoys this banquet, no, but all those who have laboured on the margins, crawled in the lowlands, been cast out and abused. All these I will let sit at my table, all these will be my guests; there will be chops and sausages, vegetarian hamburgers too, great piles of mashed potato there will be, tomato sauce and cans of peas; there will be bread and dips; pizza we will have and pastas of every sort; all halal meats we will eat, bled and tender and lean; we will eat sweet-and-sour pork and rice-paper rolls; green curries and red curries, hot and mild; all this will be ours and we will eat it together as one big family under one big sky.

  The next morning, with Murphy hobbling like the geriatric ass that he is, we resumed our journey through Deer Park and St Albans—car wrecks, shredded rubbish, in places great crops of plastic tree-protectors stretching out across both banks like the tombstones of the fallen—and around the back of Caroline Springs towards Leakes Road north of Rockbank. From there I planned to lunch at the memorial in the picturesque town of Toolern Vale, cross the perilous Lerderderg Gorge north of Bacchus Marsh and take the snaking gully inland.

  I felt purposeful in my step, if not sprightly; aside from a few swallowtail clouds the heaven above was spread with blue. Then I saw a red hatchback, parked on the gravel verge. It was hard to tell from that distance (despite the comfrey compresses I put on my poor eyes every night) whether what I saw rocking back and forward inside was a head or a headrest. But as we got closer it became clear to me that behind the wheel of that four-door runabout was a soul at the end of its tether. I tied Murphy to the fence and tapped on the window. Are you all right? I asked.

  Not everyone sees me—it just depends. I am Old Truth, Enduring Myth, Simple Hope, Unfashionable Kindness. If you do not need me, you will not see me. Shelley Jaecks looked around. Pitiable sight! Cheeks streaked with tears, eyes red and make-up smudged, a snotty nose. She would have been an attractive woman once, had not the ravages of poverty and time marked her face. She was in her late thirties, at most. With flibberty fingers she lifted the sodden ball of tissues from her lap and dabbed her poor nose with it. I opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat. It smelled of cigarettes and pine forests. Shelley had seen me and could no longer deny I was there—old schooldays Simpson, whose story crackled out of the cassette deck every anniversary afternoon and whose likeness could be followed in the picture book the teacher then held up to the class. Selfless Simpson the Saviour, giving comfort to the injured on his egalitarian ass. Shelley and I both stared out the windscreen. In the back seat her three children slept. There was a sadness in the car like slow-falling rain. Tell me your story, I said.