Dreamer in the Dry

Prologue

The Near Future

Decades of international terrorism, refugee resettlements, one-sided trade deals, and UN negotiations have led to the creation of the independent Islamic state of Capricornia. It occupies the mainland of Australia, north of the tropic of Capricorn. The remaining southern states have amalgamated into the United States of Southern Australia (USSA), with the exception of Tasmania, which seceded and became part of the emerging economic powerhouse of New Zealand.

The continent remains in the grip of permanent drought. The only major meat sources in USSA are kangaroos and emus, farmed on vast, dry paddocks surrounded by twelve-foot fences. Cattle and sheep are becoming more scarce in Capricornia, and they are farmed on pastures that were once rainforests. The lamb and beef industry is restricted to halal meat, but some is exported to the USSA at exorbitant prices. Capricornia is a peaceful, prosperous nation. It shares the world’s longest land border with USSA.

Australia is a land where water is more valuable than oil and peace is annoying the hell out of somebody.

Chapter 1

His father’s death forced Max to feel a mixture of regret and frustration. Like most sons, he regretted not making more of an effort to know the old man. His frustration, however, was unusual. And now he was confronted by documented proof of paternal madness.

A month had passed since the body of his father had been found slumped in the corner of the decrepit outbuilding that had been his home. Sometimes, in the evening, poring over the meagre mementos, Max remembered his father’s funeral. The day had not been anything like Max had imagined it would be. In all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen, funerals had been held on bleak, wet days—days with rolling, dark clouds and sleeting rain. Rain on the day of Bill MacDonald’s burial would have been a miracle; there had not been any rain in the region for more than twenty years. Rain would have been something good, and Max knew that nothing good could come from his father’s death… just as nothing good had come from his life.

He remembered the quiet ceremony at the graveside. Matthew Watson had been there, the only person who seemed to be moved by the old man’s death. The priest had done the job as a favour to Matthew; Max’s father had never been seen near the church. Two Pitjantjatjara elders had attended and spoken quietly to Max afterwards. He remembered seeing three other men beside one of the old graves at the centre of the cemetery. They were dressed in black and made no move to approach Bill’s grave or speak to anyone. Max saw them shake hands when the coffin was lowered into the ground. Mostly, he remembered the feel of Kate’s hand in his as they walked away. She said nothing, but she squeezed his hand longer than necessary as they walked around the edge of the graveyard.

Max had accepted his late father’s eccentricities alternately as harmless or annoying. His very name was the result of that eccentricity. His father had never given him a name, always referring to him as Boy. His father, Bill MacDonald, was known to the locals as Mac, and that led to his son being called Mac’s boy. The longer name was quickly abbreviated to Max. This suited him well until he started school and needed a second name. Even by primary school age, he had decided that he did not want his father’s name. Instead, he chose the Pitjantjatjara name for the local waterbush. Thus, Max Ilpara was the name that appeared on his school records, and ultimately, his ID. Nevertheless, he allowed himself to be called Max Watson, and that was how most people knew him.

Max had never known his mother. The accepted version of the story was that she was a young Pitjantjatjara girl who had been seen a few times at the edge of the camps with Max’s father. She had turned up at the base hospital in labour and died suddenly during the delivery. Nobody else claimed to be the child’s father, and Mac never actively denied the connection. So it was that Bill MacDonald took the infant he called Boy home to the Watson property. And at age twenty-four, Max assumed he would never know the story of his origins in any more detail.

He had been told enough by Matthew Watson to piece together some of his father’s history. The story of how Bill MacDonald came to live on the Watsons’ property had been kept quiet at MacDonald’s insistence. Soon after he took over the management of the property, Matthew Watson found him wandering in a dry creek bed. MacDonald had been in a dreadful state: he was dehydrated, unkempt, and confused. He refused the offer to stay in the homestead, instead preferring to camp in the old outbuilding about 100 yards from the main house. Matthew and his young wife, Libby, fed the dishevelled man and helped him clean up. He was close to Matthew’s height, but he was so painfully thin that, when he wore some of Matthew’s clothes, the shirts billowed like sails if they weren’t ferociously tucked into his underpants.

It took nearly a month for his memory to come back sufficiently to tell Matthew his name. The first time he said Bill MacDonald, it had been in a whisper. He then repeated it over and over, each time more excitedly as his memory returned. The repetitions increased in volume until he suddenly stopped and blurted out, But you mustn’t tell them I’m here. Despite persistent questioning by the Watsons, MacDonald remained stubbornly quiet about who they might be or why Matthew mustn’t tell them about him.

Shortly after MacDonald’s memory returned, two men in dark suits called at the Watsons’ property and asked whether they had seen anyone matching Bill MacDonald’s description. Their Oxford accents were out of place in the Australian bush, and something stirred deep inside Matthew. Indeed Matthew felt more trusting of the strange, thin, demented man in his back shed than the two neatly dressed men standing in front of him. It seemed as if MacDonald may have been persecuted, and he wondered whether the two men were responsible.

With time, Bill MacDonald and Matthew Watson developed a bond of trust and an unusual friendship. MacDonald seemed content to stay in the outbuilding and Matthew avoided the subject of his past. MacDonald earned his keep by repairing small items about the farm and scattering food for the chickens. He kept very much to himself, spending days at a time poring over sheets of paper, scribbling notes and diagrams that he would hurriedly conceal if anyone called in. He cooked and cared for himself in the increasingly cluttered cubbyhole he had made in the outbuilding, only accepting the Watsons’ offer of dinner in the homestead on Sundays and Christmas day. He occasionally wandered away from the homestead and visited the Pitjantjatjara camps where his pale skin was known.

He had lived that way for a decade when Max was born. He brought the boy to his outbuilding rat hole and just looked at him. He had no idea what to do with the baby. It had not occurred to him that he might not have been the child’s father. In the confusion after Max’s birth, when the boy had been thrust into his arms, he had simply walked away from the hospital. Max may well have perished had Libby Watson, herself three months pregnant, not heard the infant boy crying the next morning. It was clear that Bill MacDonald was incapable of caring for the child, so Matthew and Libby had stepped in.

Never formally fostered or adopted by the Watsons, Max was brought up alongside their own daughter. Even after Libby left, Matthew continued to raise Max as his own. Two children were hard work for a single farmer. The two children were four years old when Libby left, and their sibling bond grew greatly. As Max grew closer to Kate, he felt her father becoming increasingly resentful. Max felt somewhat responsible for the deterioration of the Watsons’ marriage, and as he grew older, he felt that his own father should have shouldered some of the responsibility. He had never been able to get a sensible answer from Bill MacDonald and stopped trying to talk to him after his ninth birthday had been completely overlooked. He even took to calling his father Mac along with everybody else. Max’s own feelings of guilt eventually drove him out of the homestead when he turned fourteen.

He often looked back on those days and tried to analyse his thoughts. There were so many feelings he had not understood at the time. Kate had gone off to high school in the city two years earlier, only returning on weekends. That situation left Max alone with Kate’s father. Max used to rush off to the local school early and find any reason to be late home in order to minimise his contact with Matthew. The weekends were awful unless he managed to get out of the house early. Sometimes, he went over to the camps; sometimes, he fossicked around the old creek beds; and sometimes, he hid until Matthew left the house and he could read in peace. It wasn’t that Matthew made him feel uncomfortable; it was quite the opposite. Max’s unease stemmed from his unexpressed guilt.

Max truly felt comfortable only when Kate came home on holiday. They talked for hours when he found her alone. The mid-winter holiday after Max’s fourteenth birthday, however, had been unexpectedly uncomfortable. He did not understand the new feelings he had when Kate was around. He started to sweat and felt his heart jump into his throat when she entered the room. It was at about that time that his recurring dream changed a little: he started to recognise that the girl in his dream was Kate. She was trying to show him something. In the end, all the discomfort compelled him to set up home in an old shed behind the jackaroo’s quarters. He put in some rudimentary plumbing, but stopped short of a kitchen. His status allowed him to dine in the homestead.

Max lived a spartan life in what he described as his studio. He could play his guitar when he liked and no one complained if he sat up reading all night. He no longer had to sneak around and pretend to be busy. And the last ten years had seen him become a reliable jackaroo by day and a recluse at night.

Max sat at the table in his room. It was a timber slab balanced on bricks at the back. In the front, it had two old bedside drawers. It worked well as his desk. Piled around him were the boxes of papers that belonged to his crazy father. They were all he had (and more than he wanted) to remind him of the old man. But he hadn’t wanted them to be thrown out with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of Bill MacDonald’s life. There were two shoeboxes and an old biscuit tin stuffed full of different-sized pieces of paper, old envelopes, a few pencils, and some paper clips. There was no order to any of it. Max decided to browse through it.

He opened the first shoe box and took out a thick wad of yellow lined paper. It was half a legal pad, folded into thirds. The paper crackled as he opened the creases, and the first page tore as he tried to lift it away from the rest. There was an ancient coffee stain halfway up the pages that had stuck them together. Max opened his pocketknife and carefully sliced the pages apart. As he read the first page, he was surprised by its neatness and clarity. He had expected his father’s handwriting to be erratic and illegible, as unreliable as his verbal communication had been. There were no headings or page numbers to act as a guide, but the writing style mimicked that of a diary. Max found himself reading about events on the farm he remembered from his childhood. The history was scattered through a disjointed commentary of the minutiae of life as seen through his father’s eyes. It jumped from a maudlin account of his loneliness to a slapstick pursuit of a giant cockroach. Without preamble, there was mention of Libby Watson leaving the farm. He explained that Matthew Watson had alternately railed against him and spent nights drinking with him.

Despite the smudges and three or four incomprehensible, rambling passages, Max managed to read through thirty pages of the yellow pad. It no longer felt like rubbish; he was intrigued. As luck would have it, he had stumbled upon the most legible and sane writings first. He sifted through the three boxes in an attempt to piece the writing together chronologically. Matching the paper type was no help—there did not seem to be more than a few sheets of any one type. Some were clearly a lot older than others, as was evident by their yellowed or faded appearance. Some had line drawings without headings. He tried sorting them into piles, but it was an arbitrary process. He knew he would need to read each page before he could put them in order. As for the pages with drawings and diagrams, however, he placed them all into the old tin.

That night, he slept restlessly and woke several times, each time with the diary in his thoughts. The water dream came again. Max had dreamed of water since his childhood; usually the same, long dream. Although his skin was dark, in the dream it was black. He could see his toes wriggling beneath the surface as he stood in knee-high, cool, clear water that lapped gently around his skinny legs. There was always a fish just out of reach. He aimed his spear, and sometimes, it flew from his hand of its own accord. It landed in the water looking broken the way half-submerged sticks do.

If the dream lasted long enough for him to retrieve the spear, he would see a fair-skinned girl with flowing, blonde hair. Her white dress clung to her wet body. As Max grew older, the figure in his dream became more sensuous and clearly formed. Recently, he had been able to make out her facial features, and he was puzzled to recognise Kate Watson. As he followed the vision walking out of the lake, he could occasionally make out paintings on a rock at the water’s edge. There was a small school of striped fish and a clump of bulrushes. As the girl’s dress brushed over the painted rock, his eyes followed her up the bank and into the grass. He usually woke feeling confused, not knowing what would happen next. He also felt guilty because the sight of Kate aroused him.

Waking from the latest edition of his dream, which was still incomplete in his mind, he looked around his sparsely furnished room. His makeshift desk was littered with yellowing papers that made even less sense than his dream. A small, fossilised seashell sat on his unpainted windowsill. Beyond the pane, he could see the seemingly endless plains of cracked earth and heat haze. He pulled on his old khaki shorts and a blue singlet. It was Saturday, and he had no plans except band practice in the afternoon. His mind was half on his dream and half shared between Kate, his father’s papers, and breakfast. He was feeling around for his socks as the Range Rover came carelessly down the dirt track that separated the jackaroos’ quarters from the kitchen at the back of the main homestead. The car looked new and had an oversized, factory-fitted bull bar that was still shiny. The tyres were road tyres. No idea, thought Max.

Max joined the other jackaroos in the kitchen. They were reminding each other of the time they had recovered the priest’s new four-wheel drive from a creek bed when they heard the man from the Range Rover talking to Matthew in the next room. Max did not like his voice. The accent was harsh and somehow clipped. He heard Matthew’s gentle voice introducing the man to his daughter. Katy, this is Mr de Beer from the ministry.

Very nice to meet you, he said. "I’m here to advise on production and marketing strategies for the kangaroo meat, but I’m sure a man of your father’s experience would have thought