【荆棘鸟】第六章 05

Not all the visitors were swaggies, though they were in the majority; there was the Watkins man in his old model-T, for instance. He carried everything from horse liniment to fragrant¹ soap unlike the rock-hard stuff Fee made in the laundry copper² from fat and caustic³; he had lavender water and eau de cologne, powders and creams for sun-dried faces. There were certain things one never dreamed of buying from anyone but the Watkins man; like his ointment⁴, better by far than any drugstore or prescription⁵ salve, capable of healing anything from a rent in the side of a work dog to an ulcer⁶ on a human shin. The women would crowd around in every kitchen he visited, waiting eagerly for him to pop open his big suitcase of wares⁷. And there were other salesmen, less regular patrollers of the back-blocks than the Watkins man but equally welcome, hawking⁸ everything from tailor-made cigarettes and fancy pipes to whole bolts of material, sometimes even luridly⁹ seductive underwear and lavishly¹⁰ beribboned stays. They were so starved, these women of the Outback, limited to maybe one or two trips a year into the nearest town, far from the brilliant shops of Sydney, far from fashions and feminine furbelows.

 

Life seemed mostly flies and dust. There had not been any rain in a long time, even a sprinkle to settle the dust and drown the flies; for the less rain, the more flies, the more dust.

Every ceiling was festooned with long, lazily spinning helixes of sticky flypaper, black with bodies within a day of being tacked¹¹ up. Nothing could be left uncovered for a moment without becoming either an orgy or a graveyard¹² for the flies, and tiny speckles of fly dirt dewed the furniture, the walls, the Gillanbone General Store calendar.

And oh, the dust! There was no getting away from it, that fine-grained brown powder which seeped¹³ into even tightly lidded containers, dulled freshly washed hair, made the skin gritty, lay in the folds of clothes and curtains, smeared¹⁴ a film across polished tables which resettled the moment it was whisked away. The floors were thick with it, from carelessly wiped boots and the hot dry wind drifting it through the open doors and windows; Fee was forced to roll up her Persian carpets in the parlor¹⁵ and have Stuart nail down linoleum¹⁶ she bought sight unseen from the store in Gilly. The kitchen, which took most of the traffic from outside, was floored in teak planks¹⁷ bleached¹⁸ to the color of old bones by endless scrubbing with a wire brush and lye soap.