Hollow Earth

by John Kinsella

  169.

  The publican looked out for them, even though they’d stopped drinking. They were waiting to hear the result of their appeal to stay. We are not claiming refugee status, though if we were it should be respected. Why do you want to turn everyone away? It’s to do with whiteness and Irish dancing, and the Rose of Tralee, said the publican. We just have nowhere else to go. You’re welcome here, said the publican, with half an eye on a World Cup rugby match in which the Australians were playing the English. What happened to those Irish–EU passports I hooked you up with those years ago? Manfred, who trusted the man who made jokes at his own expense and did not see dairy farming as the be all and end all, said, Ari sold them ages back. Ari has her ways – she gets things. Indeed she does, said the barman, winking – not out of sleaze but admiration. She’s one of the aes sídhe, she is. I have seen her on Knockaphuca, three hundred and thirty seven metres above the waves. I have seen her there from in here, in the bar, with the wild weather coming off the Celtic Sea over Clear Island, over The Calves. Well, anyway, I’ll have a pint of lemonade, said Manfred, tired from rock-picking. The weather was warming up a little and it was muggy. Soon the tourists will pour into town, said the publican. I know, said Manfred. You forget we spent the season here some years back. I never forget, said the publican, used to pointless, repetitive and obvious conversation and semi-enjoying it. I threw O’Regan out again last night because he came in stinking of the cow shit. He can drink at home.

  170.

  The portal has moved, said Manfred. At the thin time of the year we must be at the top of Knockaphuca, not Mount Gabriel.

  But that’s months away still, and we have to leave before they deport us.

  Not if we officially apply for residency. It will take months before we’re refused and thrown out.

  Passports are a problem — always a problem! Why don’t I sort something else and we’ll leave.

  No, Ari, I know it’s the way back. We’ll be there at the thinnest time of the year when the ghouls and witches are in the town street and the memory of famine is dragging its bones into people’s homes.

  How much unchange of God do you have in your pocket? I’m on my last cent.

  180.

  Zftelø, the low-flyers of Hollow Earth, were very like surface quail. Their little wings beat rapid truths as the birds ran across grasslands.

  181.

  Manfred had known Hollow Earth was close long before he broke through, long before he encountered Zest and Ari and took them back with him to the surface. Caves had intrigued him. A special auntie who had stayed with his mother after his father went away was a speleologist in Britain. She gave him a caving book. His mum and his auntie took him to Crystal Cave at Yanchep, to Jewel Cave and Lake Cave ‘down south’. And when the water in Crystal Cave was sucked away by suburbia and refilled by the same machinery that had denuded it, he foresaw the coming of the Underworlders but had no words for it.

  *

  Crystal Cave

  I have been reading Aquatic Root Mat Community of Caves of the Swan Coastal Plain, and The Crystal Cave Crangonyctoid Interim Recovery Plan 2003–2008 by Val English, Edyta Jasinska and John Blyth on behalf of the Aquatic Root Mat Community of Caves of the Swan Coastal Plain; what lured me to this was revisiting Crystal Cave at Yanchep over the weekend and being traumatised by the trauma of extinction. I could twist this into a lyric, but line length becomes the gauge of rendering, root hairs sniffing out water deeper, deeper, until the ghost flits, crosses over: the underworld is never truly deeply under. There’s no mystery or intangible extraction to illuminate an ontology. But personal history is part of a stimulus to delve deep, yet not so deep because the Crystal Cave, like the other Yanchep caves, is not that deep: maybe stretching down to fourteen metres (and no more than twenty metres for others) below the surface. I have visited the cave at roughly ten-year intervals since I was three and Mum took me with Julia and her daughter, Ginny (same age as me), to see the subterranean ponds lit up by glittering lights, the tarnish we tasted as raw fear, representational stalagmites and stalactites (guides reincarnate and say, ‘Remember, stalactites hold tight to the roof’). Last time we visited – another ‘we’; I always think of visits as part of groups – there was still water in the cave fed by a stream through karst, caverns of limestone-collapse fed by the great Gnangara Mound. That last visit but one will always be my point of comparison, as the crangonyctoids, invisible to our stares, question their belief in a steady state of the universe, now hanging on by a thread, the hair’s breadth of a root mat kept alive by water pumped in, we visitors looking on, expanding our vistas.

  *

  In the Redcliffe Caves Auntie had fused with the sand and made a memory. They were started back in medieval times, she told Manfred. He slowly turned the pages of the book she’d given him. They are not mentioned in that book, Manfred. The Three Counties system is an entire world, though when the book was written, all those networks of caves that have been shown to join up wasn’t called that. It was fully grown, of course, but hadn’t been declared, hadn’t been fully ‘explored’ – it had been there so long, his special auntie insisted. She said, Robber barons will sail across the pond – or, should I say, back across the pond, because many of them came from where I came from in the first place … quick for their dissenter’s release on the Mayflower … will sail across and exploit the system, for that’s what it will be called eventually. She was a mixed-up prophet who went to church every Sunday to tell the minister when she took communion that she didn’t believe – people tried to avoid kneeling next to her, and the minister always said, You will soon. One day you will see Lost John’s Cave and Ireby Fell Cavern and know fully what you have been made for. I believe in destiny, said Auntie enigmatically. Your father was a bastard, Manfred, he messed up your mother inside.

  182.

  On the day of his fifth separate school IQ test, Manfred was drunk on green ginger wine and had a migraine headache. He has no future, said his teachers when the [confidential] results came back, and leaked them to his enemies. He was the top in all his classes, and they intimated he’d got there through subterfuge. His enemies, sporty boys, gloried in his disgrace. Red tape is what mining companies and developers want to eradicate, he wrote in an essay on Kafka, to free themselves. That way they can wipe our slate clean and sit on a big pile of waste. You are mixing your metaphors, Manfred, and failing to understand the faceless tyranny of the state. You will never make a libertarian! On the same day that his essay on Kafka was given a five out of ten, he was assaulted in the school change rooms with a relay baton. That’s a fact, too, but there’s no official record of it.

  183.

  Manfred acquired a friend when his mother moved them to a country town on the coast, about two hundred k’s from her brother’s farm, where Manfred had spent six months when she was in Egypt, trying to unravel the truth of alien visitation and its impact on the development of humanity.

  This friend had a massive pile of pornos given to him by an older brother who had been in the Vietnam War and then gone to central Africa as a mercenary. It was old but good porn, as Alex, his new friend, said. Alex had a dirty mind and enjoyed stirring Manfred up. Manfred didn’t mind because he never had many friends and had no desire to keep this one so he preferred to dislike him deep down. Alex said, I’ll teach you how to have a laugh, mate – there’s something wrong with you. Everyone reckons you’re a weirdo.

  Alex and Manfred wandered the quasi-suburban bushland edge of the country town together most days after school. In searching through a bunch of stuff dumped at the vacant bush block down the road from the street they both lived on, the boys found a box with a weird picture on it and the words The Blake-O Enlargement Method. As they fought over the box, the contents spilled onto the sand – a huge, clear tube with an opening at one end and a pipe at the other with a hand squeeze pump attached. What the fuck is that? Neither wanted to touch it, but they poked it with sticks and threw small rocks
at it. Then they poked at the box and flipping it over saw there were instructions pasted on the back at a slight angle – a picture of a little cock and the tube over it and then a second picture of some guy squeezing and squeezing and lines showing air being sucked out and then a third image of the guy holding the tube in one hand and a massive bulging whopper cock – his measly little cock made fucking enormous – on the other. They stared and stared, then one of them said, Wow … and then they burst into laughter. Dirty bastard! Shee-eet! Some dirty bastard has stuck his prick in that tube and pumped and pumped till a vacuum has sucked it out into space! Urgh, yuck … I reckon that’s his gunk stuck on the inside … look at that, er, smear … They cacked themselves laughing, though Manfred worried about germs and didn’t find it particularly funny. Still, he thought, I can’t go through life not finding funny what others find funny. Participation is important, he thought.

  *

  Alex and Manfred made a bomb. The explosion that maimed Alex for life wasn’t meant to happen. It was the joke that could never be made. Extreme distress, Manfred was told by the psychologist he was forced to see at the town hospital, can cause affect problems. Laughing at inappropriate times. Saying offensive things that humiliate the person being spoken about, and the person speaking. You need to be conscious that what seems normal to you in your mannerisms might not seem normal to others. That you need to react in appropriate ways, especially at times of distress or crisis.

  Manfred accepted he’d behaved oddly, but he’d had no malicious intent when he’d said to Alex, then in hospital with his parents and a doctor also standing at his bedside, It looks like you’ll be needing the Blake-O Enlargement Method. Manfred had actually thought this immediately after the explosion, as Alex was writhing in agony on the ground, clutching what was left of his genitals. Manfred hadn’t said it then, but had said it once Alex was safe and being looked after. Manfred thought Alex would appreciate the joke because he had – well, he’d had – such a big cock and Manfred’s was, well, so mediocre, as Alex had told him at the piss tray at school on more than one occasion, and quite a few times when they’d gone for leaks together in the bush.

  But their friendship survived Manfred’s faux pas, at least in a vague sort of way. And in their early twenties, when he was finishing his university degree and his mate was the largest pot dealer in Perth, they spent most of their days together smoking from a glazed clay penis bong. It was Alex who said, Mate, you should go and find yourself – you know, do something other than sit around here pulling cones. Sitting around stoned all day with me watching The Mike Walsh Show and Here’s Lucy and Days of Our Lives ain’t gonna help you or me – I mean, it’s not like you’re paying for your smoke, is it? You’re not a good business proposition. Alex also said, Keep away from Boog and Nina, they’re rubbish. Now fuck off, and go and fill that aching hollow inside you, mate. You’re a sponge and you’re giving me the shits!

  Manfred was thinking about all this as the baby was crying and Zest and Ari were arguing about her buying a bag of pot after being clean for so many months. DON’T SMOKE IT AROUND THE BABY, ARI!

  185.

  Zest wakes, the baby is in its cot, and Manfred is studying her face. She says, I dreamt I was swimming in a deep cave. Manfred had been telling her of the caves of his childhood, how close he must have been to her at the time. In Hollow Earth, he’d never visited the caves of Zest and Ari’s land. There are deep caves, said Zest, much deeper than any of the surface world. We too have our interior life. Manfred flopped back on the pillow and said, Yesterday, as I was reading a book, the lines of print started wavering and buckling like railway track in an earthquake. Zest was crying green tears. I also dreamt, Manfred, that they bored a hole through the floor of the Pacific Ocean, through all the plastic rubbish, bored a hole right through to Hollow Earth, and all the ocean poured in and drowned my people and all interior life. It was terrible!

  186.

  As HLH and the Underworlders-to-be broke through into Hollow Earth, they were accompanied by the massiveness of Mahler’s 8th, which was an insult to the music and its composer. The music of Hollow Earth had always been small-scale and quiet, with the largest gathering of musicians being no more than a dozen. Instruments were simple, if not rudimentary, and primarily woodwind and strings. Singing was (and in the camps remains) the highest art form but one without hierarchy. Anyone singing was respected. Skills were not taught, they were acquired. I most want to sing again, Zest had said to Manfred. On the surface, Ari and Zest could not sing as they wished. Something to do with the density of the air, they said. Our syrinxes just don’t pipe properly. Sometimes Manfred sang spirituals taught to him by his mother, which Ari and Zest enjoyed, placing their hands on his chest to feel the vibrations. Though he spoke in a tenor, he sang in a bass. He could hold a tune.

  187.

  We are the haunting to the dead whose world it truly is, Zest had told Manfred not long after he met her. Where I come from, said Manfred, the living are constantly trying to track down the dead. Do they fear them? asked Zest.

  188.

  A poster on the wall of the supermarket a few days before Halloween, seen by Ari, who is worrying about their immanent deportation from Ireland to nowhere:

  Lucida, Diva of Bitcoin, Resolves to take you all Into her nest, to share Her wealth and vision. Join her. You know Where to find her 100 million likes Tell the story!!!!!!

  189.

  It’s these little grotesqueries that will lead to our doom, said Zest with gravitas.

  I regret that many strange things have been left unsaid. Many extraordinary experiences have been omitted, because I am desirous that this brief history of the happiness that befell me and my devoted sailors in Atvatabar should be published without delay, to allay the natural curiosity excited in the outer world by the story of our discovery of Plutusia.9

  We must watch no one tries to follow us through. We must hope, said Ari.

  190.

  It’s a letter – no, a card – from Boog and Nina. How on earth did it find us? It was sent six months ago. It has been to Germany, Britain, the USA, Ireland … But how? Nobody knows how to find us aside from the Irish authorities. What’s it say? Before you read it, take a look at the picture. What?! It’s a fjftw¬øwer! How did this happen? What? called Manfred from the kitchen, where he was bouncing the baby in the kick-and-play with one foot while peeling potatoes at the splintered kitchen table. Let me have a look. That’s a night parrot! he said. No, Zest and Ari said in sync, it’s a fjftw¬øwer, a bird of the Xentter Island out in the Great Water. We have only seen painted images, but it’s Hollow Earth’s most revered creature. It burrows and flies on evening light to small pools of fresh water. It knows not to test the sky. It’s a night parrot, once thought extinct but not so. It suffers all over again now there’s an explorer industry around finding it, fetishising it. On my uncle’s farm I always thought I’d see a pair and their young out on the salt. Farmers hate the salt – they see it as worthless, though they themselves nurtured it. Creatures have a hope of survival out there. I hear them singing Ding ding dingaling ding, or Ding dong, dell, Pussy’s in the well … over and over. They are always noisy at night in my head – it is always evening or night in my head. A cause célèbre, its rediscovery by the world hungry for newness from the old will be its end. What does the card say? Well, it’s written in minuscule letters – it’s hard to read. I think there’s a magnifying glass in the drawer of the hallway table. Thanks. Okay, it says:

  Dear Aliens

  We are sober, we are clean, and we’ve taken to the desert. We have found the inland sea, though the only water around is that we draw from a deep well, brackish but potable when boiled. We are writing to invite you to join us, to make a family with us. To be part of our little commune of two, well, five with you. Maybe over the years the commune will grow. Even out here, where it is bloody red dust, the good fortune of a well means we can grow our own vegetables. Sacks of rice, flour and lentils are th
e basis of our diet. We eat only plant matter and we converse with the night birds. Every few weeks we go into Kal for supplies. We are both painting again. Though you probably don’t even know we are painters. Not a skerrick of our old lives was evident in our swill pit in Freo. We only worshipped drugs. We only cared about amusing ourselves at the expense of others. We had become glib, even terminal. Your leaving woke us, then we looked into the hollows we had created in each other, then turned into ourselves. Sounds quaint, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, we still think all such sentimental shit is, well, shit. But it’s true, too. True shit. And now we’re painting apocalyptic paintings of birds that know where to find water in a desert. And now we’re making contact with the people whose land this really is. And now we’re looking into the eye of the well for some kind of truth. Mining start-ups send their teams around looking for uranium, but we have plans for those bloodsuckers, those poisoners, those new colonists. We are colonists too, but we want to fix that. We have plans for restitution. We have plans. We are learning how to be artists again. Come to us. There’s an old guy living on the far side of the lake we call an inland sea and he’s an artist as well. Nina reckons he’s more dead than alive. He gets water tanked in. No well over there. But that’s light years away and we want the company. Come to us come to us come to us!

  Love,

  Boog and Nina

  That’s it. There’s no address on the card but the back of the envelope has Poste Restante, Kalgoorlie Post Office, Western Australia.

  191.

  We should take up Boog and Nina’s offer, said Ari. We can sort the travel, we can sort the documentation.