at the edge of the fire pit without apparently feeling any discomfort. He thought how he’d like to touch the soles of their toughened, calloused feet, just to discover what they felt like. Bone? Sanded wood?
The roo was left to continue cooking in its own juices atop the iron sheet for another fifteen minutes or so. Then the ribbed sheet of metal became Clarrie’s cutting board as he sliced thick juicy slabs from the haunch and shoulder with an old but evidently very sharp wooden-handled knife. He put some of these aside for himself on the edge of the corrugated sheet and placed the rest of the prime cuts on an old tin plate which he handed to his father. Next to be served were Cookie and the elderly blind man. Then a procession of people appeared fireside with an assortment of plates and bowls. One of them was a sensational looking girl in a pink mini skirt and white T-shirt which set off the dark colour of her skin. She looked shyly across the fire at Chaseling before melting back into the darkness with a segment of roo tail on a tin plate.
Finally, just when Chaseling was starting to fear that he was going to be excluded from the feast, Clarrie motioned for him to come over to the other side of the fire pit. Despite being the last to be served, the portion dished up onto a plate-sized piece of cardboard was a generous one, thick slices from the top of the roo’s massive back legs. He returned to his position on the far side of the fire, where he took a piece of the dark, delicious-smelling meat and popped it into his mouth. He chewed tentatively, then greedily at the lean meat. It was tender, gamey and juicy, with a smoky aftertaste.
After dinner, Clarrie produced a battered-looking acoustic guitar. He started strumming, and even though the instrument had the top string missing, he managed to coax a good, tuneful sound from it. He played a rhythm which was part reggae, part country and part something else not so easily defined. Then he began singing in the Pitjantjatjara dialect. The old blind man hit two sticks together, producing a slow, hypnotic rhythm.
Chaseling closed his eyes as he listened, then opened them again as guitar, vocals and clap sticks were joined by a series a visceral, other-worldly sounds. Noelie had sat down alongside his son and was blowing into a two-metre long didgeridoo painted with images of animals and other tribal emblems.
Closing his eyes again, Chaseling reflected that this was the most relaxed and contented he had felt in a long time. For years, in fact. Since he’d started training to be a doctor.
Chaseling had an extremely retentive memory which had always helped him pass exams with a minimum of study. All the same, it had been a hard slog. Six years at the University of Sydney medical school, then another year as a hospital intern. He hadn’t had much of a life during that time. His existence had revolved around passing the next series of exams. Then when he’d started at the hospital, the challenge had been shifts which stretched for twelve hours. It was during such a shift that Chaseling had been caught in flagrante delicto with a nursing assistant in a storage room. They weren’t actually interrupted in the act; they’d finished their brief but intense coupling on the floor atop a makeshift bed of hospital gowns and they were getting dressed. A flushed and sweaty Chaseling was putting his foot into the leg of his trousers as the nurse, a petite blonde named Maria Vlasnik, was reaching behind her back to fasten a flesh-coloured bra.
The door suddenly opened and a male nursing assistant called Federico took a half step into the room before giving a gasp of surprise. Then his lips contorted in revulsion and he gave a little squeal of horror. ‘B-but, you’re married!’ he said to Maria.
‘Things haven’t been going well at home lately,’ she replied dismissively.
The male nurse’s eyes lingered on Maria’s cleavage as she bent down to retrieve her blue uniform shirt from the floor. Then he backed out of the room and slammed the door.
Federico hadn’t reported the incident but he’d gossiped about it. Maria was transferred away from the orthopaedic ward and word of the illicit union filtered up to Chaseling’s boss, the hospital’s head of orthopaedics, Professor Miles McManus.
McManus was an evil-tempered tyrant who routinely shouted at doctors and nurses in the wards and operating theatre. He had a very high opinion of himself and an almost uniformly low opinion of the junior doctors and nurses in his charge. For years, he’d got away with terrible bullying and sexual harassment. He fancied himself as a ladies’ man, sporting a thin, carefully trimmed moustache in the style of Hollywood heart throbs Clark Gable and Errol Flynn. Not so long ago, he’d been able to virtually take his pick of the young female doctors and nurses in his charge. But seemingly overnight, he’d grown old. And conventions had changed. These days, when he made sexual advances to the women in his workplace, they were invariably rebuffed. His last conquest, if it could be called that, had been a 61-year-old ward sister, who’d shown up for their romantic liaison with her face caked in makeup and her body squeezed into a dress two sizes and around thirty years too small. When he woke the next morning, McManus had looked across at the face of the snoring woman next to him lit up in the cold light of day – and reflected that she looked like some dreadful old whore.
And so when McManus heard how Chaseling had been caught half naked in the storeroom with the vivacious junior nurse, a woman who’d curtly rebuffed his own clumsy advances, the news made him bitter and he started singling Chaseling out for particularly vicious treatment.
In the operating theatre, McManus would snarl brusque commands to Chaseling from behind his surgical mask and find fault in everything he did. During ward rounds, he ignored him. Some of Chaseling’s colleagues sycophantically followed the professor’s lead and started treating Chaseling as a non-person, staring straight through him when they passed in the hospital corridor. It became a toxic workplace and he was hugely relieved when his internship came to an end.
But still McManus continued to haunt him. When Chaseling applied for jobs as an orthopaedic registrar at major hospitals in cities and provincial centres, he was continually rebuffed after the Professor was contacted and gave a damning assessment of Chaseling’s abilities. The only exception was Alice Springs Hospital, which had offered Chaseling a position after interviewing him via Skype. He didn’t know whether they had talked to McManus or not – probably not, although there was always the chance that the Professor had relished the idea of banishing him to the most isolated part of Australia and had thus finally given him a positive rap when contacted by the HR manager of Alice Springs Hospital.
Now, as he relaxed by the fire in the middle of the desert with his new friends, Chaseling reflected that what he’d considered to be an exile to central Australia was actually going to give him experiences that he’d never have in any city. Despite his car having been wrecked, he was relishing this adventure. He was living a life.
He stretched out sideways beside the fire, which had now all but lost its glow, just faint points of dull red light shining here and there in the otherwise dark embers. But the full moon provided a light bright enough to read by. Reclining with the edge of his head against his hand, his eyes took in a couple of empty food tins at the edge of the fire pit. They were rectangular shaped with rounded edges. Chaseling tilted his head to read the label. ‘CAMP PIE,’ it said.
Chaseling remembered Camp Pie from his boy scout days. Only by nomenclature was it related to the pie and its many manifestations, from Australia’s humble beef and gravy offering to gastronomic delights like Beef Wellington. Camp Pie was a variety of the reconstituted meat commonly known as spam. He suspected that it figured a lot more prominently in these peoples’ current diet than kangaroo or other traditional indigenous foods. At medical school he’d learned that poor diet was the prime reason for the shockingly high disease and mortality rates among Australia’s indigenous communities. The life expectancy of the people he was sitting with around the fire was something like ten years less than his.
What Chaseling didn’t know was that there was about to be a sudden jump in the local mortality rate here in St Catherine’s.
8 RUBY’S NIGHTMARE
ALI RAPPED HIS KNUCKLES against the weather-beaten door. ‘Hello?’ he called. All he could hear were faint strains of music and people’s voices from some other houses a few hundred metres away. But when he’d emerged from the desert into the bare dirt back yard of this house,