WE LEFT ADELAIDE behind us. Adelaide, the city of churches where the Auntie collected me. I had made my way across the tarmac and into the airport, searching the crowd for her face and the face of my uncle. I saw her eyes first, deep brown eyes reflecting something of myself, eyes that seemed to watch as if from another place, a place out of step, bright and so alive. And the other face, the one I only faintly expected with the green green that were my uncle's: nowhere to be seen. And so we had left Adelaide after a stop at the Adelaide market for those provisions that we wouldn't find in the North: six bags of Columbian coffee each a kilo in weight, a quarter wheel of a Tasmanian cheddar, dried fruit, figs, prunes, apples, mango, whole dried bananas, half a kilo of tissue-thin sliced ham from an old Sicilian gentlemen that recognised my Auntie. A case of white peaches and two boxes of the best blood red oranges from somewhere down on the Murray Darling completed our stores and provisions.
We drove in a white, red-dusted, Toyota Land Cruiser, clearing the city, cutting out though a modern development and into suburbia, pyramids of salt in the bay, and drifting into agricultural land, all the while me passing my shame and awkwardness off with chatter, and my Auntie all the time laughing, very lightly, at the absurdity of my stories. And my Auntie very subtly smiling, and when I turned to silence, gently looking over at me with her very special eyes, eyes that were deep brown, almost black but for the light inside that seemed to somehow catch the sun when even the sun itself was obscured and darkened by cloud, and her sharp ear that sat symmetrically against her blue black hair, with these she weighed each word in grams and kilos and smiled always kindly, never mistaking or missing the false claims that passed my lips.
And we drove.
And we drove.
And the land moved before us.
And the continent stretched out like all immensity, as if everything could be contained in its barren folds. Stretched out to so far that if you followed the land you would find the place that the sun set, everything at the edge of the world, at the edge of our continent, the boundaries of our imagination.
And so I smiled.
And lowered the window.
And the road rose up and the miles stretched on.
And my Auntie mentioning this and that in passing, facts about the landmarks, recollections of a place that we passed through, remarking on small things that other people might fail to note, bare testament to distant land formations and geographic structures that she had become connected to and that contained a story. And inside me the promise of the road seemed to awaken a lost sense of possibility, and I felt as if the past and the pedestal that I had perched on in my youth began to fall away from me, the rock that I had held claim to in all my youthful folly. And so I did not feel as if I was running away from the small, petty trials of the adolescent world that I had left behind me.
And on this road, in such fair company, how could one reckon the miles, and how could one count time, how could one apply their mind to all things quantifiable, measurable, mechanical, robotic, subhuman, from an age that had no time for the soul, and the spirit, and for growing, growing and treading upon roads, and carving paths as we had once done with the ancients, how could one feel or want all those things they were becoming separated from. And I left all form of measuring that I had become a prisoner to behind me, and left myself to the mercy of the journey North oblivious to fate and circumstance. I had spent the previous evening drunk and stoned with friends, and all the while feeling shamed at leaving. And in the end I sat till dawn with only my closest friends and confidants, and we had pored over maps and charted my journey, and this in turn had led to discussions and conversations of other journeys, and other roads that I might tread, other roads that they too would tread after me. We did not call to mind places as they were defined in our age, but turned to an antiquated, battered Risk board, upon which we had waged countless wars upon each other, where we had played as war chiefs before we rode our crazy horses and set off like braves into the world, like braves, and young shamans, and artists, and lunatics, not knowing if our world or the world beyond us was the wilderness. We dreamt of different places; Siam, Kamchatka, Irkutsk, Afghanistan, Central Europe, Mongolia, places that were as much concepts as countries, dreams as aspirations - Madagascar, Siberia - all the while murmuring as the miracle of dawn drew near, and my confidants departed one after the other, until only one was left, and the sky light of dawn rose, and over the mountain hung a solitary cloud, as it does before the rain, and my last companion stretched out the hand of friendship (and I knew then that I would never see him again in this way, in this mood, in this fashion and with these feelings), and he collected his maps, and notes, and sketches that had somehow become like a city of their own inside the attic above my bedroom, and he left and I watched him walk away, and I knew it had come to this, the time to leave, and I knew that unlike the others the last man would stay, and see us all one and the same, on a dawn like this, and bid us adieu.
And the road stretched on.
And before us a hitcher.
And we stopped, and dropped him at the next town.
We travelled wrapped in the comfort of our silence. And lost in my own thought of long roads and distant places I barely noticed the world that rushed past me in shades of green that turned to brown, and yellow, broken by the powerful blue sky that was suspended in its vastness, immeasurable, boundless blue. And in my drifting I caught, as from the corner of my eye, names that I had heard from my mother and father, my uncle, and when he was still amongst us, my grandfather, names of a country that my people had journeyed to from beyond.
Gawler.
Riverton.
Saddleworth.
Auburn.
Burra.
Petersburough.
We pulled into a quiet town, and very calmly, very coolly as if she were walking on china plates, as only she walked, my Auntie entered a favourite bakery. I smoked a cigarette and watched the crows and they in turn hopped about the road and looked back on me with their big, long, mean black beaks, until my Auntie returned, once more, with the pies. They were good pies, South Australian pies, with a dusting of pepper, and I covered mine in Rosella sauce, and washed it down with Coca-Cola. I turned and looked around in the distance towards some foothills, in the direction we were going, the land looked harsher, and empty, and there was silence there, even the wind seemed to move with long flat steady hands that sent dried grass and dust tumbling, and the sky certainly higher now, as it leant down on us with more weight, and bluer, and vaster, only broken by long white streaks, more unimaginable than any sky that I had seen, but for the skies of my childhood, when I had journeyed here in my grandfathers day. But my grandfather had never come this far North, not everyone can endure emptiness and peace.
Once more we hopped in the Land Cruiser, and now our conversation turned to the land, and the road turned to dust, and stones that pitter-patted like hail on a roof in a storm. We were getting close now, nearer to the landscape my Auntie knew line for line and stone by stone, and she promised that we would go to this place or that place, a picnic here, on the weekend when we had finished the hard yakka, as she smiled and eyed me, and I quite stubbornly looked away, and felt conscious of my long whisky limbs and my unworked body.
And then I saw the escarpment, the escarpment that cut the line across the horizon as far as the eye could see, and beyond the escarpment was the desert, beyond the escarpment nothing would grow, there was no grazing, and before the escarpment was my uncle and his station, that existed in defiance of, in mockery to reason, science, man's precious propositions and assumptions, so far North, and in such an inhospitable land, where a madman might break rock to make water. It seemed an eternity, the last leg of our drive, through the gate and over the grill, and me very clumsily volunteering, and closing, the gate behind us, and then the long drive down the dusty road to the homestead. And the homestead was not as I remembered, the ironed roof that had once been rusted, and warped, and dented in parts, was now a deep red weatherproof that was impervious to the force of the sun and nature, and the old verandah once bent and cracked and nobly decrepit was propped up on new laid stones, with oiled wooden beams suspending it, and holding down Burra slate. We pulled in to the yard, and there was no sign of the old fox, as my brother liked to call him, the old fox our uncle, with his vast holding that stretched along the edge of the land as far as the eye could see, hugging the edge of the desert, well ordered, with his fences and wells and stock yards, well ordered and impractical, the land he had brought long ago with his wife in some decrepit state, a grand state of decay, they had worked and built with their own hands, and somehow their hands had delivered. And then I saw him turning into the yard, He had changed and readied himself for our arrival, he sported a clean sky-blue shirt, made of thick cotton, denim jeans worn at the knees, and a pair of Italian walking boots. He looked at me with his steady, watchful green eyes, his freshly shaved face still, apart from the lines and valleys that crisscrossed the thick skin, skin mirroring the surroundings, surroundings he had been born and raised into. An old bitch rounded the corner behind him, a ragged old thing, what they call a kangaroo dog, all skin and bone and sinew, with a light walk and a long tongue that hung between two very long very sharp canine teeth. And she circled me and sniffed me, and then bounced over to greet my Auntie with affection. And my uncle looked at me.
-Well hello, he asked in his way. With his own unique slow deliberation. And in his word and the change of his tone you could not help but hear other words and questions:
-And what have we here.
-And what are you; and mostly:
-I can see you, I can see who you are, and you can't hide from me, and most of all it doesn't matter, at least it doesn't matter to me. But what are you, and more still what can you be?
And I returned the greeting, and we emptied out the car, and everything was silent. And I wondered what was I doing here? Had I been sent here? Had I come of choice? Was I hiding? Or being renewed? Or was I connecting with the past, was I not only hearing his voice and his questions but the echoes from somewhere else somewhere deep, from the cemetery or the grave, the voice of my ancestors, that he had somehow come to represent, and that I was somehow connected to. And the sun was high, and we sat drinking tea with mint, and cake that my Auntie pulled from a tin, and the phone rang but no one answered it, and my Auntie showed me to my room, and I put the bags down and returned. And my Auntie sat down, and my uncle stood above her, his one bad hand on his hip and the other very dextrously rolling a cigarette and all the while looking at his wife, and she asking about the door, about the door with a mischievous smile on her face (and her trying not to laugh), about the door and if he had finished it. And he, my uncle, he became animated, and excited, and started exclaiming, sure, have a look! Sure, you ought to have a look! And she just smiled and told him to show her later and she started putting things away, and he became more animated and more irritated, and insisted on showing somebody, and so the two of us walked down through the hall out on to the verandah, and with a sudden gesture he lit his smoke, and we walked together around the side of the house to a door, a door that was covered in thick paint, thick, and deep, and dark, and crusted, and somehow surreal, and alien, as if the door had been unhinged from an other world and placed on hinges in this very strange house, filled with books, and bodhisattvas, paintings, maps, brick and track, and unutterable treasures, and all around it still more, and more books of philosophy, history, fiction, art, books in foreign tongue and languages, in various states of life and decay, all very carefully shelved and indexed, alongside antiques, and dried flowers, and carpets and wall hangings and more, and more books, and more and more objects and treasures, each unique, and long sought after, that I would surely lose myself in and soon discover.
-Have a look, he remarked proudly. And I very seriously, as befitted the occasion, bent down to study the door.
-Eight coats, he remarked with the cigarette in-between his teeth.
And once again it struck me the paint was unusually thick, and in places congealed, and bubbled, and it was as I imagined the hull of a ship might look before a maiden voyage. And I looked once again, and turned to look at my uncle doubtfully. And he began to talk.
-Eight layers, eight layers of the finest paint, like the eight-fold path; I left ten days drying between each coat. Of course I researched it thoroughly. It's not just the quality of the paint, its technique, suggested to me by a friend, an artist who recently did a sculpture, in the desert, and this was the same paint that he used, it was a major piece (though some of the reviews were unforgiving, but then that's critics and scholars!) and I have of course consulted such and such the architect, although he was of the opinion that I have overdone it (laugh) Architects! (with good-humoured dismissal). And I looked to the doors of the monasteries in the high Himalayas, and remembered seeing such a door in Tibet, when I was perhaps a little older than you, and such a door I had never seen until I saw such a door on a high pass that lead to a monastery, and I researched such doors, I researched these doors for a considerable time, and I had to be most patient to acquire the appropriate text to research this door, in fact this door does perhaps predate my time here (as if he had only come here yesterday, rather than forty years ago), yes I do in part think that I first conceived the idea of making such a door standing alone outside that Tibetan monastery itself, and on that day some premonition, some idea, basic in its essence, and deadly meaningful moved me. As if I had seen that door and said yes I shall have such a door, but I shall have to make such a door of my own, for the thousand, upon thousand of miles I would have to move this door would perhaps be senseless, when I could make such a door of my own. And time passed, and then there were the walls, and the roof, and the yard, and the fences, and the cattle, all of which I now think were perhaps secondary, all of which I conceived after the door, you see that door struck me like few other things.
And what good would of such a door been if it did not at least have a study wall to be hinged upon, and if that in turn was not fixed with good mortar, and stone, and roofed so that the walls themselves would stand to hold the door itself, and what would such a door and such a house have been if they had just stood there for nothing? But you see such a door, such a door as this door, which would best be considered the door from that Tibetan monastery (as my architect friend has suggested) could only be in such and such a place. An isolated place, like on the edge of this impossible desert, or upon a great mountain plateau, that was made desolate and bare by the relentless fall of snow and ice - he paused for a minute and drew his breath.
-And how the monks paint the doors, in heavy lacquered layers, so the door will be impervious to the harsh conditions, to arid conditions, and to the wind and ice and snow. A door made for harsh conditions not unlike these. So I have emulated the doors of those monks of Lhasa, and of the Tibetan plateau, and to good effect - I have perhaps not perfected the art but certainly I have improved it! Yes and it is better to improve something than to perfect it, for to perfect an art one runs the risk of engaging in imitation, he nodded, and I ran my hand across the door's surface.
-And if you look closely you will see I have written a mantra, just the faintest line, here on the topmost corner, the correct positioning, as a tribute to the works of those monks that I have emulated, and their doors that are said to last a thousand lives.
And he turned away, and looked into the distance smoking, and I turned back to study the door now, somewhat more seriously, as if there were something in that door that needed to be very, very carefully considered, as if perhaps this door had drawn me to the North. I looked at the rough lines, and the thick paint, and the uneven, heavy congealed lines, and streaks of paint, and its rustic, primitive texture, and the layers upon layers of paint and colour and texture. And I looked once more at the old man who still stood there smoking, and not speaking, and smiling with a hint of amusement at the seriousness with which I looked at his door. And I turned once more and thought of my uncle, and knew whoever came here, whoever looked at that door, could not but leave without remaining convinced that this was in fact the most beautiful, elegant, well-crafted door that they had ever beheld. And still I couldn't help but think everything around the door was secondary to the door, even my response, even my emotions, even my response to my uncle, everything came after the door, all things apart from the door were secondary.
-Like the monks of Tibet, I remarked without meaning to, without hearing my voice, speaking aloud but not to anyone but myself.
And he passed me the smoke, and he turned, and studied me, and then changed like an apparition, his countenance changed quite suddenly, and there was a fearful air of wrath upon his face, while his eyes turned from green to a color grey deep and stormy.
-Like a lion I have no fear, like an elephant I have no anxiety, and like a madmen I have no hope. So says Milarepa: and as he finished his face relaxed and his eyes softened and there was depth and humour that radiated from his eyes, and he laughed a long, rich, and deep laugh that echoed from deep down inside his soul. And I, in my foolishness, nodded studiously. And I took the smoke from his hand, and like a small bird I crouched on the slate and drew back and looked out across the land.
I could have kept on running, and driving on - there to the edge of the earth, and indeed fallen from it, though somehow here on the edge of the escarpment, by this door, this was far enough.
Tadhg Muller is a Tasmanian writer based in South East London. His short fiction has been published in Australia, UK, and USA. He buys and sells cheese to earn a buck, and writes after sunset.