Caravan Story Read online

  I stand there looking at the back of Polly’s head. She drags another chair up beside her and gestures for me to sit. She pours whisky into two plastic cups: I take the drink and sit. I want us to forget what happened today, she says. She’s talking about the fuck. I nod my head. Forgotten, I say. She allows herself some time to think. Do you think this was a good thing, she says, coming here, this change? I shrug my shoulders. We both drink. The thing is, says Polly, I’m not sure what good we’re actually doing. Good? I ask. Well, says Polly, there’s no question we’ve got all these people out of the city so the new developments can happen but now that we’ve got you all here—well, all right, listen. She stops, leans over, picks up one of the boxes stacked up all around us and empties the contents onto the desk. It’s a big stack of papers, in bulging manila folders. Two silverfish crawl out from under the pile and run around the desk: Polly kills them with the flat of her hand and brushes them onto the floor. This, she says, lifting up the thick folders one by one and making another pile with them: this is just some of the work that has already been handed in. (Handed in?) All kinds of work, every style—they’re waiting for it to be transferred to computer. But it won’t be transferred to computer—there are no computers, as you can see. She sweeps an arm around the room. No, it will stay here in boxes like this until there is no more room for it and then it will be taken back to the city and pulped. At around this point, she says, each writer will start receiving their rejection slips from the publishers we have supposedly sent their manuscripts to—here they are, in here, all prepared, all ready to go. (She pulls open a drawer and takes out another manila folder with the words Rejection Slips scribbled on it: she opens it up and pushes some of these slips across to me.) All the usuals, as you can see—not suited to our list, list is full—you’ll all get half a dozen each of these and that’s the end of that. Some of the more deluded among you might have another go at another piece of work, some might even try for a third or fourth, but in the end you’ll all be worn down. You will decide, and the quicker the better (this new young lot I hope very quickly), that this is not the life you wanted after all. You’ll become copy editors or arts bureaucrats, advertising people—citizens, that is, who might actually make a worthwhile contribution to society. But what about Laburnum, I say, I’m making good progress—wasn’t the idea that there might be a pre-existing readership for such a piece, and that once I’d written it you would help me find that readership? Where on earth did you get that idea from? she says. Here—she takes some of the rejection slips from the top of the pile—you might as well have yours now. There’s a pause. She smiles. She laughs. I want to smile too—clearly it is all a big joke—but I can’t. So the question is, says Polly, getting all serious again: what good are all these writers, what worthwhile contribution could any of you possibly ever make, how could any of you ever possibly pay your way?

  She’s serious. She’s seriously looking at me. I don’t know what to say. The actors have found a way, the painters, and the musicians—I thought that by writing my history of Laburnum I too was making some sort of contribution. Obviously I’m not, nor any of the others; Elizabeth Jolley sits up on her bunk all day working and what she does is utterly worthless. But don’t get me wrong, Polly is saying, tomorrow I will distribute kits to each of our new arrivals—by tomorrow evening there might be ten new histories of Laburnum being written, ten new collections of poems dealing with the minutiae of domestic life, and each will then enthusiastically employ themselves on the content of these kits in the hope of making something of them. But the fact is, this work will serve no purpose, it will leave no mark, it will simply gather dust in the boxes here and get eaten by the silverfish. Yes?

  There’s someone at the door. It’s Büchner. He’s brought another box of papers. He’s the paper collector. He won’t let me catch his eye. He puts the box on a stack of others and leaves the room quietly again. Polly looks at the hole he’s made in the air. Anyway, she says, turning back to me: there it is. That’s it. I like you. You fucked me. I feel like you should know the truth. There’ll be changes tomorrow, new challenges—she’s standing up, pushing in her chair, giving me the hint I should go—so let’s leave what is left of this day and sleep. She grabs a linen sheet, gives it a flick, lets it rise up and settle back down softly on the bed. (In here, I think, with no windows?) For some time I stand and watch Polly going about her business: smoothing the sheet with her hand, fluffing the pillow, taking her pyjamas out from under it and fluffing it up again. She unzips her dress. She stands and looks at me. I realise I am meant to go. Close the door behind you, she says.

  Outside it’s very warm, very still; the air is heavy, loaded. The deep black sky, the number of stars—these are things that cannot be described. The camp is quiet. Here and there a light is on, in the tents torches and candles eerily flicker. A small group of new writers are sitting in a circle of chairs outside one of them, leaning forward and talking quietly together, no doubt trying to make sense of the situation they’ve found themselves in. I should tell them not to bother.

  I can hear a tap running—from the tap on the shed wall beside me where earlier in the day the brushes were washed I follow the snaking line of a hose until my eye arrives at Büchner’s caravan. The light is on inside, I can just make out the shape of George Bernard Shaw at the table, and in the light spilling out into his garden—low shrubs, herbs, flowers—the shape of Georg Büchner with a hose in his hand.

  PART TWO

  one

  Light rain is falling, you can hear the water dripping from the roof. People are moving in and out under the tarpaulins with their plates of scrambled eggs, walking them back to their caravans and tents. Old planks and other bits of timber, in places whole pallets, have been set down over the mud; they form an odd network of interconnecting pathways, along which, especially now, at meal times, the human traffic passes back and forth. The sky is leaden; it won’t rain properly, only these soft misty showers that start, stop, and start again. A small detail has been set to work digging trenches around the tents but a heavy shower looks unlikely. It’s not cold, in fact it’s surprisingly mild—spring is with us again and the days are getting warm.

  Do you want the rest of this? asks Elizabeth Jolley from up on the bunk. She’s only taken a couple of mouthfuls from her breakfast: Büchner takes the plate from her, sits back down at the table, pushes aside his empty plate and starts eating what is left. Gwen sinks back into the pillows. I hear a cough, then a sigh, then silence. Some days she does a little work, propped up on her pillows in the tiny sliver of weak sun falling in through the window beside her, but mostly when collection time comes Judd finds her empty-handed. The town doctor comes to visit, an urbane young man with a gentle manner: he stands next to her bunk so that he is looking her straight in the eye and they talk in low whispers; I hear her roll over, then roll back again; I hear him tapping her chest and back, pumping up the blood pressure armband and the sound of the velcro tearing. It is left to me to make sure the tablets are administered correctly.

  I watch Büchner shovelling the scrambled eggs into his slack, fleshy mouth. It’s funny, I’ve got strangely used to him since he moved in: his clumsy, fumbling ways. He’d barely got his garden going before his old housemate passed away; his caravan was repossessed and filled with five young poets, and the ruined garden with a cluster of annexes and tents. He sleeps on the bunk below Elizabeth Jolley. It’s an awkward but not impossible arrangement. My partner comes back every week or so from her touring but she usually only stays one night before they are all off again somewhere else. We sleep together on the lowered-down table-bed but we know that any real intimacy is out of the question—a caravan shared with two other writers is no place for noisy lovemaking.

  Each day I take my papers and go and sit out under the tree, the big old gum beside the gravel track on the right half-forward flank at the main road end. I take a chair from the storeroom, my information pack, some blank paper and a pen and under its
broad canopy I make a kind of garret en plein air. It is a small world, the bark at my back, the gravel at my feet, the papers on my lap, the roof of branches overhead. Life in the camp—the bustling, seething life in the camp—goes on around me and I watch it as you would a dream. Smoky fires burn here and there, people move about between the dwellings; everything is painted in muted tones. Laburnum is for me now, and me alone. I know perfectly well what its fate will be, I know there is no open-plan office full of straight-backed typists transcribing my work and preparing it for publication. I write the papers, I let them go, and the next day I write some more. Once they have passed from my hands into Judd’s (Büchner no longer collects them, he fell badly out of favour—but it would take too long to explain) and from there into the big blue wheelie bin with the padlocked lid that appeared at the back of the changing shed a few weeks ago (they go in there, I know they do), there is no point dwelling on them any more. It’s like I told her theatre should be: I live in the moment, then the one after that.

  When with wrinkled hands May Fairweather lifted from the washtub the heavy clothes and looked out the window towards the back track and saw the horse and dray approaching through the trees, her first thoughts were of her husband, who had that morning left to take their cow to market and who was not expected back till evening. May shook the water from her hands and wiped them on her apron and brushed aside a fallen lock of hair. She had just that morning been wondering again why so few people passed this way. It was not as if they still lived in complete isolation, far from all civilised society. The eastern corridor had begun to open up, acre by acre the rough bush was being cleared and tracks were being carved through it. On his infrequent visits to market Ernest Fairweather inevitably came back with another report of the extent to which the landscape had already changed—there was even talk of a rail-line coming their way, he said, even to their front door. With these thoughts in her head, May Fairweather watched the dray approaching.

  Look at them all, says Büchner, pointing out the window. It’s true, it’s an extraordinary sight. There are almost three hundred of them now, going in and coming out of their caravans and tents, standing in groups under the plastic sheets and tarpaulins, queuing down the street for the last of the scrambled eggs. I don’t know where they all come from, I don’t know where they all go: somewhere up at the headwaters of writing new blood pours down every day like rain, gushing and rushing downstream until our dam is ready to burst. To see yourself as part of a community is one thing, to see yourself as part of a plague quite another. Is that what day by day makes Polly’s ragged, desperate look even worse? Did she have any idea what she was letting herself in for, had anyone warned her how many people now actually call themselves, shamelessly call themselves, writers? She can tick the boxes and take the kudos for the acting troupe, the painted silo, the string quartet playing lunchtimes for the toothless elderly—they’ve gone now, the other artists, they’re all out there working—but she can’t get around the fact that for every writer placed, ten misplaced remain.

  Polly. It’s her eyes now that get to me. They have a hunted look. When on the narrow bed in her office I sink myself into her and look into her eyes for the code to her thoughts I see someone hunted—looking, listening—taking pleasure in the deep sucking pull in her groin but at any moment ready for the knock at the door. Sometimes there are queues out there, snaking back through the storeroom, asking for help of some kind—they want to change their topic, there is no soap in the showers—and sometimes, yes, when we have finished our loveless lovemaking and I have dressed and opened the door they will all be standing there, all waiting their turn. She is far now from being the crisp upright sweet-sour-smelling Polly who stood at the door of the caravan in the street that day, the clipboard under her arm. All these trials have played havoc with her dress, her body, her face. She still wears the obligatory red lipstick, but she has let the other make-up go. Her skin is pasty, with a slightly sweaty sheen; she no longer wears any earrings and the holes have closed over.

  Her only wish now, her only hope, is to stay on top of the numbers. It’s like shovelling dry sand out of a hole. All the originals are living four, sometimes six, to the caravan (we’ve managed to keep our household to three, only because of our special past relationships with her); the new arrivals are crammed into the seventy or so tents and makeshift dwellings spread out all over the oval. She has acquired the adjoining paddock from the farmer who owned it and could expand the settlement out there too but she knows she will have to set limits eventually. Once you’ve said you will accommodate everyone—with land, housing, food, water, praise—there’s no telling where it might end. Unless some kind of solution is found soon these writers will keep breeding and spreading like rabbits (or kangaroos, passim Büchner); they will not merely ‘penetrate into the regions’ but completely overrun them.

  There’s a big clean-out coming, says Büchner, maybe reading my thoughts. (He always has some gossip: he may have slipped down Polly’s ladder but he’s still good for gossip.) I saw the booking for the bus, he says, it’s licensed to carry forty-two, so it looks like forty-two are going.

  It happens without warning. One morning Polly comes flapping around the camp and starts rounding people up. A bus or a couple of minivans appear, the chosen writers are piled in, driven off and never heard from again. They’re running workshops, Polly tells us, conducting readings, teaching courses, becoming critics, starting careers, and with no available evidence to the contrary we have to believe her. Jane Austen disappeared in this way, so too the writer I’d called Leo Tolstoy. Often lately they are the new arrivals—greenhorns who’ve barely had the chance to settle in before they are being moved on again. Sometimes there is a similarity in age, sometimes in gender, sometimes, Büchner insists, in genre or style. But really, for all the theorising, no-one really knows why some are chosen and others not. They go from here and they never come back. They’ve gone to ‘a better place’, says Polly, a place of agents, publicists, interviews and book signings. They might get driven off a cliff for all we know. Meanwhile we stay here, in this awful slough, sucking on the dug of dubious benevolence.

  Büchner picks up his plate and goes outside. The rain is clearing. Elizabeth Jolley has fallen back to sleep. It’s Saturday, I should relax, pick up Laburnum on Monday. Tomorrow my partner will be home for the day; we’ll go for a walk, sit together under the tree. She will ask me how it’s going and I will tell her, the whole sad sorry story. Yes, I have trouble believing myself sometimes the person I am, I’ve become. Nights when I pound my body against my benefactress’s and she talks filth into my ear it scares me to think what might become of me yet.

  After lunch a football match has been organised. I go outside to watch the preparations, standing on the rise near the outer wing. Makeshift goalposts have been set up at either end of the adjoining paddock and a rough oval has been marked out with flour. Someone is picking up cow pats with a bucket and spade. A plywood scoreboard is propped up on two chairs with the names of the combatants on it—Poetry v Prose—and nails to hang the numbers on. It’s Polly’s idea of fun. Once lunch is over everyone starts moving over there, taking up their positions around the boundary line. The teams are small—like most of Polly’s organised activities there is no great rush to take part. Both teams are a ragged-looking lot, indistinguishable except for the fact that all the poets are wearing hats. The crowd is enthusiastic, though, cheering and laughing as they run onto the ground.

  I watch it all from my place on the rise—I’ve brought a chair with me and am sitting on it with a blanket over my lap. Shouts, the sound of foot on leather, the umpire’s whistle, the occasional sudden uproar from the crowd, all these sounds drift to me on the still afternoon air. Over by the paddock gate a group of farmers have gathered, behind them a cluster of white utes parked at all odd angles; they are watching the game, watching us, but from a distance, so as not to interfere. Some small children run up and down the white flour boundary line, fo
llowing the trajectory of the ball, back and forth, back and forth. There’s a roar from the crowd and the scorekeeper hangs a ‘1’ on the nail under ‘G’ next to Prose. I see Polly approaching around the gravel track from the changing shed; she walks down the grassy bank and slips under the barbed-wire fence. She’s wearing her weekend clothes, jeans and a sloppy cotton top, her hair pulled back in a pony tail. The hand that feeds me. She moves around the outer edge of the crowd, some people turn and acknowledge her but no-one actually invites her into their group.

  Now I see the chef approaching around the gravel track from the changing shed where a one-tonne ute is unloading supplies. He still has his apron on. He stops on the rise overlooking the paddock, bunches up the lower half of his apron and wipes his hands on it. He glances in my direction then goes back to watching the game. (We call him the chef but of course he’s the caretaker. Not long after his interview with Polly she gave him the job—it’s true that we had, inadvertently, taken his other one from him. With the help of usually half a dozen rostered assistants he cooks the food, morning, noon and night, to feed just under three hundred people.) I watch him standing there; then, seeing Polly, he too walks down the bank and stands at the paddock fence. He attracts Polly’s attention and calls her to him. The game has tightened, Poetry has scored twice in quick succession, and the crowd around the boundary line remain oblivious to the furtive conversation now taking place between Polly and the chef. The chef points back towards the changing shed; Polly looks in that direction, then after a quick further conference she crawls back under the wire. I watch them make their way up the rise: together they walk back to the changing shed and are swallowed up in its shadow.