The Complete Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

sweater, made a face, and looked away. A draught of cold air streamed over us as we rolled down to the town bridge with its drift of bluish mist and up to where the other ute, with Matt Riley and his nephew Jem and their dogs, was parked at the petrol station before the entrance to the highway. Matt Riley, the white breath streaming from his mouth, was out of the ute, checking one of the offside tyres. Jem was driving.
    I had known Matt Riley for as long as I could remember, though we had never had a proper conversation. His wife, Eileen, was our ironing lady. Every Monday morning he dropped her off in his ute, and he was there when I got home, silent, drinking tea at our kitchen table, waiting to take her back again. She ignored his presence, laying aside the shirt she was working on to make me a malted milk.
    I was fond of Eileen. She was full of stories, told in a language, all jumps and starts, that I had got so used to at last that it seemed the only language for what she had to tell. I had never asked myself what might be peculiar about it, or where it came from. As I never asked myself why Matt Riley was so subdued and retiring in our kitchen and yet soquietly sure of himself, and so readily deferred to, when he was inspecting tyres or setting right an unbalanced load.
    As for Jem, he had been one of the big boys when I started school. In the same class as Glen McGowan. A dark, sulky fellow, I thought. Although he was a big boy he could neither read properly nor write. At fourteen he had gone off to become a roo-shooter like his uncle.
    He was no longer sulky. Just big and silent, almost invisible. His uncle Matt's shadow.
    An hour later we had left the bitumen and were bouncing due west on a clay highway cut clean through the scrub. The sun was up and had burned off the early-morning chill. The dogs were alert but quiet. Braden, his knees drawn up, one of the dog leads round his wrist, was dozing, his head toppled forward under his hat. Stuart, after a bit, leaned across, unwound the lead and passed it to me. The big dog, Jigger, turned its head in my direction but did not stir. “Good dog, Jigger,” I told him, roughening the gingery ears, "good old boy.” He lowered his head and settled.
    I was beginning to feel good. We were riding high up on the camber of the yellow-clay road, which had been washed by the rains so that it was all exposed pebbles with eroded channels on either side, then tough grass, then forest.
    Stuart shook a cigarette out of the packet in the breast pocket of his shirt, dipped his head to take it between his lips. He offered me one. I shook my head. Smoke blew towards me. Sharp and sweet.
    “Big day, eh, Angus?”
    It was. He knew how long I had wanted this. To come out here, be one with the others, part at last of whatever it was. The sky above us was high and cloudless, as it is up here in winter. Stuart followed my gaze as if there was something up there that I had caught a glimpse of, a hawk maybe; but there was nothing. Just the huge expanse of blue that made the air so clean as it tumbled over us; as if all this—sky, forest, the warmth of the big dog between my knees—was part of the one thing, a consciousness—not simply my own—that belonged not only to the body I was in, back hard against the metal side of the truck, muscles flexed in my calves and thighs, belly empty, but also to some-thing out there that I had melted into as one melts into sleep, and was infinite.
    I did sleep, and was woken by Stuart punching me lightly in the shoulder. “Wake up, Australia!”
    We climbed down. The other ute was already parked.
    We were at the little junction station where the Chillagoe line branches west into anthill country: a water tank and pump, a general store, and the two-roomed cottage-cum-stationmaster's hut. It was the established custom for parties going out to the Lagoons to stop here for breakfast, before going down to the general store to fill the emergency petrol