Simpson Returns by Wayne Macauley

Author:Wayne Macauley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

5

THE QUIET GIRL

I shouldn’t have done that. Nine hundred and ninety metres above sea level, up a winding road, with an enthusiastic Afghani whipping your hide. Murphy knew it a moment of great import and gave it all he had but now that we were back in the lowlands, just the two of us, on those straight roads through the stubble fields towards the vanishing point, he had slowed to a snail’s pace, wheezing and panting for breath. I slowed my pace to match. The distant markers—a tree, a ridge, a farm shed—took so long to come towards us we might have been moving backwards. I gathered some pellitory from the side of the road, made up a decoction and force-fed it to him. It’s to ease your wheeze, I said.

The memorial at Joel Joel was our next stop, in a paddock at a junction of roads past Warrak, Ben Nevis and Crowlands. I hoped to find offerings there. We were already finding drier air: a powder-blue sky above and a powerful sun approaching its zenith. Murphy’s coat had got up a sheen. I’m not sure what I would do if one day he lay down beside the road and died. Give him a kick, I suppose. But if he got so stubborn as to never move again—I mean never, ever again. What would I do then? Find another donkey? They say they run wild in the great deserts of the Interior; he is not so special as all that. But I have become fond of him, his sombre eyes, his mute expression, his slow, plodding ways. I doubt I could go on without him. It’s true I’ve had carnal relations with him—as repugnant as this may be—but it’s lonely out there on the road and the nights are often cold. In a duplicitous world Murphy’s unvarnished simplicity has always been a source of comfort and warmth.

We travelled all day along a minor road that chased a gully north-west. The late-afternoon shadows lengthened, the dead gums lay themselves down in black: very solid, very precise. Murphy’s footfall grew louder, the whole world grew louder, chattering its otherworldly noises before lights-out and sleep. It was almost brandy hour but I could not stop: I needed to make Joel Joel before nightfall. Murphy had other ideas. Like a dog accustomed to bringing its master his slippers as in the good old days many dogs did, with the lengthening shadows, the dancing gnats and the change in volume of the earth’s myriad sounds, my beast thought evening was at hand. Soon his master would make camp for the night and soon take the weight from his back. He stopped; I poked him. If it were not in contravention of the laws of physics I would say he then stopped even more.

It was a while since I’d used the carrot and the stick: an old trick, tried and true. The former I hung from a second stick, on a piece of string, a couple of inches from his nose.

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