Peter Temple - White Dog

Put on oven. Tomato paste? A search turned up a small tin of double concentrated, the best. I spread a thin layer on half the thawing pastry. Time to stir the mushroom pot.

Making something is always good for the soul. There is a therapy in making anything that is little remarked upon, probably because the world cares mostly about planning and results. The bit in between, the making, that doesn’t rate much mention.

Cheese? No shortage. Linda was out of control at a cheese counter. I grated parmesan, crumbled a little fetta, cut two slices of mozzarella. Smash time. I emptied the contents of the pot into the machine and gave it the chop. Then I scraped out the mixture and spread it over the tomato paste, tastefully arranged strips of prosciutto and the onion and red pepper slices on top, added the cheeses. Last steps. Fold over pastry, trim edges, pinch over, slash top, dot with olive oil and spread with finger, slide the tray into the oven.

Ten to fifteen minutes would do it. I poured wine and went back to the sitting room to listen to Schubert and to think positive thoughts about my life. The second part was not easy but I made the effort, soon aided by the wine and the cheering smell of the pie thing.

I ate, read, watched the late news on television. To bed, sliding between clean sheets, laid that day, heavy cotton sheets, survivors of the blast, unironed, stiff as the linen napkins at the Society restaurant long ago. I sipped Milo, the warm drink that passeth all understanding, and returned to the new book. Marcel, the French protagonist, was in hiding in Istanbul, hunted by four intelligence agencies because he knew too much. I read some pages, not concentrating, and I lapsed into the half-world, thinking that knowing too much was not a condition with which I was familiar. Knowing barely enough, yes, I could be hunted down for that. Too little, yes, but you’d be safe knowing too little. Except that it presented its own problems. My fingers lost their purchase on the book, it fell away from me.

I put the book on the table and switched off the light. There was music playing downstairs, I hadn’t noticed it or it had just begun. Too low to identify, just a soothing undertone. Bluesy. The new tenant, not yet seen, driver of the BMW Mini. Promising. I drifted. On the edge of sleep, Sarah Longmore’s metal horror came into my mind, the humanoid hunting pack. I pushed the thought away; the world dissolved.

‘The breedin,’ said Harry Strang. ‘People talk like they know what they’re gettin. Breedin’s a lottery, thank the Lord.’

‘Better than pulling the parents out of a hat,’ I said. ‘I suppose.’

‘Dunno,’ said Harry. ‘That can work. Take Steel Orchid. He comes of a mistake, sendin the wrong mare to the stud, ends up winnin a couple of big ones. Could’ve been much more, broke down at Rosehill. When was that?’

‘Seventy-four,’ said Cameron Delray.

‘Right. Knew it was around when Whitlam got the arse.’

We were in deepest Gippsland, on a road climbing the front slope of the Dividing Range, a wet morning, trees dripping, the world green, a feeling of being under water. Cam was driving the four-wheel-drive, a machine designed to encourage men’s fantasies of power and domination. So what if I was once Vernon the School Weed, pinned beneath the buttocks of bigger boys in the playground, crushed and starved of air, farted upon? When you look up at me now from your lowly conveyance, you will know that I am Vernon the Omnipotent, the Breaker of Worlds aka Vernon the Hammer. I am also a brilliant financial analyst, married to my former secretary, Wendy, who sits beside me: Wendy the Earthmother, upon whose rippling thighs even Vernon the Hammer is tossed like a keelless dhow in a storm. Behind us, you see Princess Emily…

A buffer stop for this train of thought.

‘This creature,’ I said. ‘Seven years old, I understood Cam to say. Two wins, two places from sixteen outings.’

‘Blood’s excellent,’ said Harry. ‘Can’t fault it.’

‘Fault its attitude without doing scientific tests. You’re thinking of buying it?’

‘Well,’ said Harry, ‘someone’s thinkin of buyin him.’

We rounded a bend, Cam slowing the brute machine, he was looking for something. This was country without signs. We had left behind the side roads with their small encampments of mailboxes made from oil drums, milk cans, hollowed-out tree stumps, welded up from bits of rusty scrap metal. Sarah Longmore could do an interesting mailbox, something the rural postie would approach with trepidation, use a spade to insert the mail.

‘Like horses,’ said Harry, looking out of the window. ‘Always did, from a young fella. Never saw a jock any good didn’t like horses. Well, with notable bloody exception. That prick Crombie, he hated em, loved givin em the stick. Ride though, the little bastard. Glue on his boots. Always had the balance. Why’d the Lord give him that? Makes no sense.’

‘An imponderable for many believers, I’m sure,’ I said. ‘This horse.’

‘Next one,’ said Cam. ‘Must be.’ He was rough trade today — unshaven, old corduroys, scuffed boots, a quilted jerkin. His usual out-of-town wear was a dark suit worn with a waistcoat.

We slowed, rounded another tight bend, didn’t pick up speed. Cam was looking right, found what he was seeking. We turned right, no mailboxes to mark this intersection, took a downhill track, grass on the hump, grass growing in the ruts, weeds invading from both sides.

A few hundred metres from the road, the track reached a gate, an agricultural affair made of gum saplings in a bolted frame. I got out, the cold a shock, raw in the nose and mouth. The gate had a homemade latch, a sensible one, not the usual rural skinbreaker.

‘Good with a farm gate, Jack,’ said Harry when I was back in the warmth. ‘Never touch the bloody things myself.’

‘Damn right,’ said Cam, expressionless. ‘Got somebody does gates.’

It was a long way to the farmhouse, a steep, winding descent through dense bush and then, suddenly, you were on level cleared land, a broad terrace, two or three small paddocks hacked from the forest. The homestead you saw from afar: a slab hut with a lean-to, a big corrugated-iron shed, half open. Closer, you saw the split firewood stacked to the shed roof, five or six years of firewood, a horse yard with a rabbit-fenced enclosure beside it, possibly a vegetable garden. They also grew more exotic things in these misty hills.

In the near paddock, two rugged-up horses had heard the vehicle from a long way away and were waiting to greet us. With them — a friend but standing apart — was a patrician Anglo-Nubian goat. Cam parked outside the shed, beside an old Dodge horse truck, red once, now the colour of rust, dents inside bigger dents. Apart from the firewood and half-a-dozen galvanised feed bins, the open shed had a rack with four saddles riding single file. They were as old as the truck but gleaming. Horse tackle and coiled ropes hung from wire strung across the space above head height, and against the side wall stood a rugged workbench with a blacksmith’s leg vice. Tools were laid out on the bench like a museum display.

‘The animal’s here?’ I said.

No reply. They got out, I got out. A keen wind was coming from far away, crossing Ninety Mile Beach from Bass Strait, coming from Antarctica. Harry made himself comfortable in his garments, adjusted them, a herringbone tweed jacket, thick grey flannels. ‘Tidy,’ he said. ‘Man keeps a grip on things.’

A door in the shed opened and a cattledog came out, behind him a man in moleskins and a checked shirt. The dog stood still, eyes fixed on us.

The man walked over to Cam, some stiffness in a leg, and punched him under the collarbone, a medium-hard hit. ‘Mongrel,’ he said. He was tall and stooped, any age from fifty, boxer’s shoulders, long nose, self-administered haircut.