Pilgrim Souls. Jan Murray
He was too masculine. Too cheeky. Too something. Too present beside me, that was it. ‘Suffolk Park,’ I said. ‘Any good to you?’
‘Suffolk Park?’ He sounded disappointed. ‘That’s fine. I’ll get out on the pub corner, okay?’
‘Sure thing.’
‘Pardon?’
I took my hands away from my mouth. I had been leaning forward while he settled in, resting my elbows on the wheel, breathing in recycled air between my cupped palms, something I did when anxious, when I needed to buy thinking time. ‘Sure,’ I said with what was intended as an insouciant shrug.
‘Thanks a lot. Its real kind of you. The pub corner at Suffolk will do just fine. I can pick up another lift from there, hey?’
His voice pitched soft and low. A man more used to intimacy than authority. Clutching at the wheel, I stared ahead through the windscreen and took in deep breaths. I could feel him observing me. Finally I put the Golf into gear and shot back on the road.
‘How long have you lived in Byron?’ he asked after we’d had gone a short way.
‘Since this morning.’
‘This morning?’
‘I bought a house here this morning. Doesn’t qualify me as a local, I know.’
No reaction to this. Instead, he turned his gaze and stared out his window. I compared him to the young kids who’d chatted to me the whole way in to the Great Northern. ‘You’d have to have lived here since its hippie heyday to qualify as a fair-dinkum Byron local?’ I said, turning to cast him an enquiring glance. ‘Since the ‘73 Aquarius Festival, I reckon. I get the feeling this place only hands out brownie points if you’ve lived here for yonks, right?’
‘I don’t mix much. I just hang in there and kinda do my own thing, y’know.’
‘California?’
‘I grew up around Los Angeles and San Francisco. Thousand Oaks, mostly.’
‘Nice place, huh?’
‘Small place. Good, though. Plenty of trees and open space back then. Where they filmed all those cowboy movies actually. Back then. Not now.’
‘Just visiting Byron?’
‘I guess so,’ he said as he stared out the window, then added softly, almost to himself, ‘But its been a long one.’
‘Oh, yes, how long?’
He spoke to a distant point outside his window. ‘Since ‘74.’
That came as a surprise. I kept looking across at him, admiring his strong profile, the baby-smooth skin of his suntanned neck and the hair that fell like black silk to his shoulders. Yes, he could trace his ancestors back to the plains of Mongolia, this one.
I returned my eyes to the road but kept the image of him alive in my mind’s eye. He wasn’t ordinary, this Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan of a man. No, he wasn’t ordinary. Neither was his musky scent ordinary. It had me imaging him in exotic places. I would put him in a desert, most likely. Corrugated sand hills stretching to a purple horizon. A turbaned head, a bejeweled scimitar tucked into his belt. Riding a camel at full tilt towards his Bedouin tent beside a palm-fringed oasis. Belly-dancers circling him, offering up their platters of dates and other desert delights.
I checked my mania, reigned in my too-fertile imagination, but understood the pull his physicality had on me and why he had attracted my attention back at the roundabout. He had secret places in him. His presence spoke of adventure.
While he had his face turned away, I made a further appraisal, admired how the sun caught the dark curly hairs glistening along the length of his strong forearms. A tattoo. An anchor. A man who lifted heavy objects. He looked fit. I guessed at early forties. Worked hard for a living. And from his tan, an outdoors guy. What was happening? His thighs were so close we were almost touching each other. When he turned from the window and smiled, I felt caught out.
‘I’ve got some of those brownie points I can share if you’d like them,’ he said with a grin.
‘I’ll manage on rations, thanks.’ I accelerated to get away from where that remark seemed headed. I had just enough smarts about me by now to know my head was not behaving.
When he lifted his left arm to pull down the sun visor, I noticed the scars buried in the hollow of his elbow. Strange. A couple of angry looking raised lines, a couple of inches long, purplish against the fairer skin of his inside arm. Some kind of accident, I figured.
‘Don’t suppose you need any work done around your home, timber work, carpentry?’ he said.
‘Oh, my god!’ I reached for the Echo and waved it at him. ‘Believe it or not, I came into the village to pick up the Classifieds. I’m desperate for a handyman!’ I looked out the window then back at him, shaking my head. ‘I knew there was a reason I stopped for you back there!’
‘Eventually,’ he said with a grin. He put his hand out. ‘Yuri. Yuri O’Byrne.’
‘O’Byrne? A touch of the Irish, hey?’ So much for Kublai Khan. That one had just ridden off into the sunset.
‘I guess. And Russian. On my mother’s side.’
We were back on the steppes. Kublai Khan lives!
‘Got it here, somewhere,’ he said, busily patting his shirt and shorts pockets, unfolding and refolding odd scraps of paper. ‘I’m a shipwright. Timber boats. He shot me a look that came with a raised eyebrow. ‘And a qualified carpenter.’
I waited while he continued to search the bag at his feet. Not the organized type. Finally he presented me with the business card. There was a phone number, but no address other than a post office box in Yamba. I studied the buff-coloured card, ragged and frayed at the edges with green writing and an attractive line drawing of a yacht in the right-hand corner. Yuri O’Byrne, Shipwright. Specialist in timber boats. Design. Building. Repairs. Maintenance.
‘I could cut you a good hourly rate. For cash. I’ve got no overheads.’
‘So, it seems.’ I placed his card on the dashboard. ‘The house is just around the corner. Well, it’s a shack, actually. Want to take a look?’
‘Sure thing. Why not?’
Why not, indeed?
THE HITCHHIKER
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach...
Robert Browning
We left the car parked beside the garage at the front of the yard and made our way through the rainforest patch, around the side path to the veranda. ‘Da, dum!’ I said, throwing my arms out to announce my humble abode.
‘I know this property,’ he said, looking around.
‘Of course. Byron’s a small town.’
‘Nearly bought it ... about fifteen years ago.’
‘The place needs work. I need all these doors and window frames replaced for a start. Can’t bear aluminium.’
‘Yeah, timber’s the go. Nothing classy about al-oo-min-um.’
His mellifluous accent was ear candy, tubs of creamy caramel sentences pouring out of his mouth. His ‘al-oo-min-um’ tickled my fancy.
I stepped up onto the veranda and opened the double doors to the inside.
‘Unless you were doing a PhD on the history of the disappearing 1950’s Australian coastal holiday shack you’d write this place off,’ I said. ‘It’s pretty ugly.’
The building was no more than a rectangle with a small corner hived off for a dog of a bathroom, made even uglier by a broken concrete floor and exposed pipes. And then there was the sorry-arse