Caravan Story by Wayne Macauley

Author:Wayne Macauley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary fiction, Australian fiction
ISBN: 9781921961359
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2012-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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