Back of Sunset. Jon Cleary
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“He’s always telling us about your dad,” said Covici, and a laugh rumbled out of him. “There are still a few old-timers up here who remember him. I’ll bet he’d be pleased to know you’ve come back to have a look at the Service. We have an easy time now compared to what he had to put up with in his day.”
It was a long time since Stephen had felt his father so close: the ghost of the tall bent man moved on the dark veranda, and Stephen felt a sudden wave of mixed love and shame, as if he owed a debt that his father had never claimed.
“It wasn’t so good when you first came up here,” said Tristram. “Eighteen years. A lot has happened in that time.”
Covici laughed again, waving a deprecating hand. He led the way into the house and showed Stephen to a spare bedroom. Stephen showered in the small cubicle at the rear of the house: three frogs shared the spray of water with him. He changed into shorts and sandals, wondering if Kate Brannigan would find him more presentable, and joined the other three men in the living-room. It was a large room but Covici, with his own bulk, and what he had collected in the room, had succeeded in making it look small. It was a room cluttered with Covici’s living: books, magazines, four pairs of boots, littered the floor. A pair of buffalo horns hung on one wall; on a shelf beneath was a human skull. An aboriginal shield hung on another wall, a stack of spears, like a sheaf of wheat, piled beneath it in a corner: in this room they did not look out of place, not in the least chi-chi. A huge gramophone stood in another corner, a mound of records on the floor beside it. A library of liquor bottles shared a bookshelf with some well-thumbed books: Scotch stood beside Scott, brandy beside Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
“I drink,” said Covici, pouring whisky into a medicine glass: a strong dose, Stephen noted, “but not to excess. This country is marked with the graves of men who drank to excess. Not that I can blame them.” He looked out the window, through the screen and the flies battling to get in, at the blazing country running away to the dancing mountains. “It’s a bastard of a country.”
“Stop laughing,” said Tristram. “Why do you stay up here if you hate it so much?”
“Because of the people,” said Covici, and took a long swallow of his whisky. “A doctor is interested in people, not the landscape. How do you think a doctor in the slums survives?” He looked at Stephen. “I worked in the slums of London for five years. Stepney in a December drizzle.” He shook his head. “That was a bastard of a country, too.”
“You’re English?” Stephen said.
“English mother, Italian father. I was intended for the Foreign Office. My father was a passionate Anglophile.” He shoved a sausage thumb in the tie that held up his shorts and pulled it away from his massive belly. “Old Etonian. My father nearly broke his naturalised stiff upper lip when I took up doctoring instead of diplomacy. My old schoolmaster still writes to me, though. He knew I was too soft in the head ever to make good as a diplomat.” He looked at his watch. “It’s nearly four o’clock, time for the afternoon schedule. Would you like to listen in, Steve?”
Stephen looked at Tristram and Charlie. “Go ahead,” said Tristram. “That’s what you’re up here for. Me and Charlie’ll look after ourselves. We’re staying to have tucker with you and the doc. They cook the best meals in the Kim-berleys here at the hospital.”
“I told you it was the best hotel in town,” Covici said, and laughed aloud: the room shook with his merriment, and the Old Etonian tie cut deep into his expanding belly. “Come on, Steve.”
Stephen rose and followed Covici. His father and mother had always called him Steve; he had begun calling himself Stephen only from the day of his graduation. He had not been able to visualise Dr. Steve McCabe, M.B.B.S., on a brass plate; patients looked for dignity, not informality. And Rona and her mother would never have thought of calling him Steve.
They crossed before the front of the hospital and went up the wooden steps to the veranda of the other cottage. A big room opened off the veranda; the door was wide open and they went straight in. Kate Brannigan looked up from a pile of telegrams as they entered.
“Just in time,” she said. “I thought you four men might have got round a bottle and forgotten all about the time.”
“Have I ever forgotten?” Covici said, and slapped a large hand against Kate’s rump. “You’d think I was a drunk, to hear you talk.”
“I have no time for drunks, you know that,” said Kate, and Stephen noticed the tinge of bitterness in her voice. “Do you drink, Dr. McCabe?”
Her bluntness surprised him. “Why, yes.” Then he looked at Covici, who gave him a warning wink, and back at her. “But not to excess. Nobody could call me a drunk.”
“You’ve just gone up in her estimation, then,” said Covici, and sat down before one of the two microphones on the table in the centre of the room. “Explain to him how all this works, Kate.”
“I thought he’d know,” Kate said. “Didn’t your father ever tell you about this?”
“It hurt my father to talk about his time up here,” Stephen said, and made no attempt to hide his rebuking of her: he couldn’t understand her hostility and he was getting tired of it. “He never got over the fact that he had to go back south because of my mother’s health.”
Kate flushed. “I–I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice was no longer calm and impersonal. “I–I have a habit of opening my trap too much.”
“It’s a habit we all have,” said Covici. “Nothing in the world opens quite so easily and readily as the human mouth. The freedom of speech isn’t quite the phrase to describe the looseness of the human tongue. I have twice been knocked cold because I opened my trap too much.”
Kate looked at the fat untidy man with gratitude and affection: a child might have looked at its father in the same way. Then she turned and walked to the wall, where two large maps were pinned. She raised her hand and for the first time Stephen saw the wedding ring on her finger.
“This map shows you our area in relation to the rest of Australia, and this one shows it in detail. This base has a radio range of 400 miles, and it is effective over a quarter of a million square miles – that’s equal to the size of France and almost as big as Texas. That’s Dr. Covici’s practice – anyone in that area can call in here on their transceivers and the doctor will go out to them. There are two of us here, another operator and myself – we go on the air six times a day, and one of us is always available in case of emergency. Each cattle and sheep station has its own transceiver, there are a few at various outposts such as the missions, and one or two prospectors and drovers have portable sets – we have seventy in all tuned in to us here, all tuned to our own wavelengths and frequencies. It’s like a radio-telephone exchange with everybody on the same party line.”
“Which means there is no privacy,” said Covici. “The base also handles all inland telegrams for the post office, so everyone knows everyone else’s business.” He picked up a telegram from the pile on the table. “Your wife threatening proceedings maintenance. That’s to the head stockman out at Spinifex Downs. I know his wife, a first-class bitch. Everyone up here will be on his side.”
“You’re not supposed to read the telegrams,” Kate said.
“When I go out to the stations, do you think the people there only talk to me about their aches and pains? I’m their father confessor, too.” He winked at Stephen. “It’s the only thing that makes the job worthwhile, the gossip and scandal.”
“It’s time to start,” said Kate, and at that moment a woman wearing a nursing sister’s veil came in the door.
“This is Matron Hudson,” Covici said. “Dr. McCabe, Grace.”
Grace Hudson was in her late thirties: her looks had managed to keep pace with her years, but only just: she had been pretty once but now she was only pleasantly attractive. A strand or two of