“No patient ever thinks that of his doctor.” Goodyear sounded cynical, but it was the truth. “Has any patient told you you looked tired these past couple of weeks? Last year when you had Asian ’flu, did any of them ask how you were? Me, neither. They pay us their bills and some of them add their gratitude as an extra. But none of them ever gives you any sympathy. When you die some of them might grieve for you, if you were a good enough bloke – I think a lot might have grieved for your dad. But none of them ever gives a thought to the fact that he might have killed you. The most heartless one in the doctor-patient relationship, believe me, is the patient.” Goodyear straightened his tie; the long hands shook a little. “Where would you go for your holiday?”
Where to go? The mind, as much as the body, needed the holiday. And where to take it? Stephen thought. Mentally, he was lazy; he had never been one for exercising his mind. When he read for instruction or the banking up of a little wisdom, he read only medical books; all his other reading was purely for entertainment, library souffle. He had never played chess or mah-jongg or indulged in esoteric contemplations: his mind, if it was tired, was tired because it had had such little exercise to condition it: it was run down from a surfeit of small talk. And yet where was he to go, that it might be revived? He was not an intellectual, a professor of philosophy who could benefit from a sabbatical amid European founts; nor an artist, who could break away from the back-biting galleries crowd and go off on his own. He would not gain by going to Melbourne or Brisbane, to talk with other doctors in an atmosphere of abstraction, away from the schedule of operations, visits and surgery hours: he was clear-sighted enough to know that, practically speaking, he was not backward in the art of healing. Australia was a vast place, but now all at once it seemed to offer him nowhere to go.
“I don’t know.” Stephen shoved his hands deep into his jacket pocket. His fingers came up against something hard and sharp: without taking it from his pocket he knew it was an aboriginal charm. His hand closed on it: it could be another portent, another door opening somewhere to a future he had never glimpsed. He was a Catholic, but all his life he had believed in pagan luck, and he knew he was not alone.
“I’m going to Winnemincka,” he said, and looked with something like triumph at the expression that could have been envy on Goodyear’s face.
At first in the glare, with the world tilted sideways against the window of the plane, Stephen didn’t see Winnemincka. All he saw was the great greenish-blue shield of the gulf and the black wounds on the yellow land that he knew were the shadows behind the flat-topped mountains. Then there was a glint, like a tear in the giant jaundiced eye that was the round window of the plane; the plane dropped lower and he saw the car coming out along the road, spinning dust behind it towards the town. Winnemincka lay against the base of the steep, flat-topped hill, its buildings marked in the glare only by the pock-mark of their shadows: sunlight flashed on a window but the flash was hardly remarkable in the bright intense light.
“That’s it,” said the shearer sitting next to Stephen. “The arse-end of Australia. Maybe of the world, I dunno. I wouldn’t wanna look for worse than this.’’
“Why do you come up here?” Stephen’s ears cracked as the plane went steeply down.
“The money’s good. What have you come up for?”
A holiday: Stephen looked out at the vast bare land and knew the answer would be ridiculous. “I’m on a research trip. I’m a doctor.”
“Thought a doc would have found enough to do down in the city.” The shearer loosened his seat belt as the plane touched down and swung round to taxi back along the strip. He looked out with a sour eye as the boab tree, its arms lifted in obscene gestures, went by the window. “Bloke wants his head read, coming up here. But it’s the money. It’s always the money.”
Stephen loosened his seat belt and stretched. It had been a long journey already, yet he knew he was really only at the beginning of it. The long flight from Sydney to Darwin in the Britannia: the business men going to London, their brashness increasing as they got farther from home, nobody in London or Hamburg or Rome was going to scare them, let me tell you; the girl singer on her way to Singapore, her speaking voice a thin pain in the ear; the missionary and his wife, their hands clasped together, their free hands clutching small Bibles, depending on God and each other for support in the wilderness that lay ahead of them. The trip down from Darwin in the old Douglas: the pearling captain who reeked of drink, six weeks of it; the meat-workers, washed and scrubbed, who somehow still seemed to reek of blood; the two aboriginal stockmen, used to buck-jumpers and wild cattle, wide-eyed with fright as the plane rode smoothly through the blazing sky. And the shearer, who came up here only for the money.
“Be seeing you, doc; enjoy yourself – although I doubt it. It’s a bastard of a country.”
He went down the aisle of the plane and Stephen followed him. The hostess smiled at him, wishing him luck; and he stepped out of the plane into the glare and a thick miasma of flies. He smote at the flies with one hand while Jack Tristram grabbed the other.
“Welcome, son. Stone the crows, you know, I wondered if you’d really come, know what I mean? Welcome back, Steve.”
Welcome back: Stephen hadn’t thought of his coming up here in terms of a return. But it was, of course. He had spent only six months here and he had been only seven years old at the time; he could remember little of the time or the place, but there was no denying his arrival here now was a return.
Tristram continued to talk as he led Stephen across the dusty strip towards a parked utility truck. Behind the truck there was a rusted galvanised-iron hangar: a small plane stood within its gloom, a bird that knew enough to come in out of the sun. A blaze of white parrakeets swung down with a loud screech and settled in the boab tree beside the shed. Three aboriginal children stood thin-legged, like cranes, in the black pools of their own shadow; an old gin, her face dark and lined as an empty water-bag, sat with her back against the post of a faded sign that proclaimed: Winnemincka Airport. The flies thickened, as if they recognised a newcomer who had not been tasted, and Stephen smote at them continuously and with increasing temper.
“This is Kate Brannigan,” Tristram was saying, taking Stephen’s bag from him and swinging it into the back of the truck. “And this is the Flying Doc, Phil Covici. This is Steve McCabe. You’ve heard me talk of his old man.”
Because of the glare and the flies Stephen had not noticed the man and girl standing beside the truck. Covici was in his fifties, black-haired, fat, jovial, unkempt: his buttonless shirt was open to his waist, his shorts were held up by an old tie, bare horny feet were encased in old sandals: only the purpose-fulness in the dark merry face stopped you from writing him off as just another beachcomber. He had an organ roll of a laugh that would be no help to him as a doctor: it would only broadcast how healthy he himself was. He thrust out a hand in which a meat chopper would have looked more at home than a scalpel.
“G’day, Steve. Glad to have you here. Hope I can show you enough to make your trip worthwhile.”
Stephen looked at him, puzzled; but the girl had stepped forward and he turned to her. She was dressed in a man’s khaki shirt and trousers; beside Covici she looked as neat as a page boy. She had high wide cheekbones, a firm straight nose and a full-lipped mouth; her face was too strong for real beauty, but it was a face that would always attract a stranger’s gaze. Only the eyes softened it: they were dark, heavy-lidded and with the longest lashes Stephen had ever seen. They were a woman’s eyes, for coquetry or the mirroring of passion; but now they appeared almost hostile. Her handclasp was firm but not encouraging.
“I’m