Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘The logical choice,’ I murmured, but he ignored this, and swept ahead, as if he was speaking into the darkness, on his own.

  ‘There was something about that sombre rangeline rising from the coast that always moved me: and the steelworks, the coal terminal, all those industrial installations that loomed like a fortress guarding the town; the curve of the shore, too, the gleam of the light; that sense of a place on notice, its time running out. I had a dear friend who lived there: he was a mathematician; his special field was cryptography; he was working on code breaking. He knew the struggles I was having with my path in art: maybe he thought we were engaged in the same kind of endeavour. I went to visit him; I stayed. I found an old house, in an old, half-deserted street: I made my studio there. And I wonder if those days set the pattern for my life now—though when I look back I find my old self always seems like a hurtful stranger, full of ill will, driven only by the most baffling, destructive impulses. I can hardly breathe when I give in to memory for any length of time. And you?’

  ‘I wonder how much we really remember, and how much we make up, or build from stray fragments to suit our current selves.’

  ‘I know we invent,’ he said, an edge in his voice: ‘Of course! But we invent ourselves forwards, just as much as back. We can see what’s coming. Time folds on itself: the world gives us its clues. Don’t you believe there are symbols that guide us? Portents? When I was in Wollongong, I was very much attuned to nature, and its messages—the way I’d been when I was a child. I felt the presence of the landscape there, surrounding me, brooding, bearing down. I used to drive up to Thirroul, up the coast, often.’

  ‘On the trail of D. H. Lawrence?’

  ‘Who else? I’d just discovered Kangaroo, which he wrote during his stay there: I worshipped Lawrence, then, for what he saw about the bush. Australians didn’t see it: he could. He heard the land: its rhythms were like music for him, a clear, constant music. I used to go walking on the rocks along the shore, down below the Lawrence house—for hours on end, for days, imagining his thoughts when writing, letting the landscape sink in to me. I was trying to remake myself, to rid myself of every trace of what I’d known. I wanted the opposite of artistry, and connections, and expertise: I wanted their antidote. I’d go down to the wharves and loading docks at night, and listen to the hoists and winches working, to the grind of the machines and the hum of the conveyor belts: I’d breathe in the fumes and dust. Who would ever capture those things! There was so much I wanted to show in paint: sights, sounds, worlds of feeling, things far past words.

  ‘I stayed in that studio house for two years. I painted; I destroyed my paintings. I had bonfires outside in the garden at 3 am: I’d watch, and see my work burn, and think as it went up in flames how much more beautiful it was at the moment when it caught fire. That cycle had caught me. I became completely dejected. I’d tried every way out of the maze. It was night, once more: the hours wore on. I paced around. There was a book on the shelf in my studio, which my mother had given me: it was about Yirawala, that old artist from Arnhem Land. I’d picked it up before, and gone through it: but it was his face, not his art, that spoke to me. On my work desk there was a container of red ochre a friend of mine had brought back from Central Australia: deep-red ochre pigment, lipstick-red. I began to sketch out a portrait of Yirawala: Yirawala as I imagined him, in that ochre—rough, raw. I was lying back, sketching, on the studio bed. My hands were barely moving: I was done in, finished; I had the sensation of drowning as I fell asleep. The strands of my consciousness frayed, and broke, one by one; I slipped away, into a stupor: darkness, more than rest. It seemed to last forever. Then a dream came: suddenly I could hear a bird singing—the sweetest song. I was in that half-awake state, when you can’t tell where the border between dream and real lies. The singing kept on. I opened up my eyes—and there it was: a tiny green and red bird, in the studio room, flitting about from here to there. It landed on my shoulder. I saw it; I felt its wings against my face; then it flew out and perched on the table of the glassed-in verandah. The point of daybreak had come: the light was just touching the highest part of the range above the town. I opened the verandah window, and picked up the bird. I cradled it in my hands, held it up and let it fly out—and at that moment something broke in me. I knew then that I was on the right path: that I needed only to be patient, and quiet inside myself—to sit and wait.’

  He smiled at me in the half-light, as if both of us had gone through that experience together. He leaned his forehead on the palms of his hands, then ran his fingers slowly through his hair.

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Shall we drive?’ he said.

  I felt a deep indifference: it was as if the force of his memories had drained all my will and energy away. I nodded.

  ‘If you like: where to?’

  ‘It’s almost dawn. Towards the west. To the open country. It’s always good to be out there when the sun’s rising, and watch that soft light moving when you’re on the road.’

  We climbed into an antique trayback, white, dust-coated, dilapidated, with bent bullbars and an array of cracked and broken spotlights. Tony leaned down and jump-started it; he gripped the wheel.

  ‘Music?’ he asked.

  ‘I think not, on balance.’

  ‘A wise choice, since there is none.’

  ‘Why ask, then?’

  ‘It’s useful to have a picture of the tastes of one’s fellow travellers, don’t you think? There are quite divergent views, up here, on soundtracks. I always ride in silence. I can still hear the sounds I’ve heard before in the landscape; it’s like hearing shadows: I hear the old chants, and songs, and voices. Even when he’s not with me, I hear Paddy’s voice, like the far-off sound of rustling paper, and the whispers and the echoes of the old people who used to drive this road with me, who’ve all gone. But when you travel with people from Doon Doon and Turkey Creek, many of them want country music: nothing else. They were stockmen; they still are in their hearts: they like good sad country music, Australian by preference—and there’s a gospel crowd as well, among the older Gija. With the young ones, though, it’s different: they always bring their own music with them—strange choices. It took me a while to figure it out. They all go for Motown; for soul, and crossover: Beyonce, Tina Turner, Diana Ross—any star with a strong look, so they can recognise the face on the cover, and work out which CDs to steal from the truck stop.’

  ‘By which you mean they can’t read yet?’

  ‘By which I mean they never will.’

  He pulled out from the driveway to the road: the verandah dogs all jumped smoothly up onto the back, and took their positions in neat formation alongside each other, staring out. We headed off: through town, over the diversion dam, on to the highway unfurling straight ahead. Dawn broke: the low peaks gleamed as though fire was burning on their crests; the trees cast long shadows across the ground. In front of us, like curved battlements, the shoulders of the Carr Boyd Range stretched away.

  ‘Sombre!’ he said: ‘See them? Dark: dark, dark, dark—all full of secrets.’

  ‘That back country, in there, behind the range?’ I said: ‘I’ve flown over it, and looked down at the ravines and the hidden valleys, and the creek beds.’

  ‘But it’s still secret: secret in plain view. Secret, like every deep truth. Of course you can get out to the rock holes and the lagoons along the rivers. It’s not what it was before, though: in fact, the landscape round here’s been changed completely.’

  ‘You mean Lake Argyle, and the dam?’

  ‘Have you ever been up there, on that road, to the caravan park, and the dam wall? It’s just a tourist attraction, these days. All that lovely country’s underneath the water: sure, you can see the old Argyle homestead; you can even walk through it. They reconstructed the original station house, stone by stone, like the Abu Simbel temples on the Nile—but people of tradition don’t go there any more—it’s a place of grief for them—and when I see the lake, even now,
so many years after it was filled, it seems artificial to me: false, sterile, with the tops of dead gum trees protruding above the surface of the water like the stones on graves. Even the peaks around the shoreline look wrong—they’re out of proportion: the light’s wrong; so is the look of the water, so are the waves of its swell.’

  He increased speed. The massif ahead of us had caught the sun’s rays. It gleamed, and flashed like ice. I flinched; I smiled, and shielded my eyes.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’

  ‘What tricks the light can play!’ I said: ‘It looks like a range of snowy peaks, reflecting back the sun.’

  ‘Is that something from childhood?’ he said: ‘From your well-buried, well-mastered past?’

  ‘But isn’t all life just a long betrayal of our first, childhood self—and then the realisation dawns.’

  ‘The realisation?’

  ‘We see how far we’ve drifted from our true being, how hard the journey back has grown. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what all the signals life sends really mean? That there is a path for us to follow, and if we lose it we betray ourselves—ourselves first of all? You don’t think that was what the messenger in your studio was telling you, all that time ago?’

  He laughed. The south-west turn-off loomed up ahead.

  ‘We’re not going that way? Towards Turkey Creek, and Lissadell?’

  ‘I tend to avoid that road, these days,’ he said.

  ‘Why? Bad associations? A crash?’

  ‘Everybody’s got a crash story in the Kimberley. It was two years ago, or three: when we were all still living at the outstation, at Crocodile Hole. Strange times!’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘And it happened on a strange morning—but the mornings were often unusual out there. I remember waking with a start, peering out of the door of my tiny room. It was just before the dawn: there were shots, raised voices. That’s when I heard someone calling my name: there’d been a fight, a stabbing. I tried to ring the police post at Argyle: no answer. We were all awake by then: all the artists. We decided the best thing would be to head for Kununurra, straight away: get out of there, not come back until things had quietened down. Rusty and the others went first. I had a brand-new Toyota; Hector was riding with me in the passenger seat. It was that time of day when everything looks pale and indistinct—just like now. See: distance, mass, volume—you can’t be sure of any of them. We were travelling in convoy, but the first car kept speeding up, then going slow. That made it hard to keep formation—and you know that stretch of highway, with all the river bridges that turn into a single lane—it’s dangerous, at the best of times. We were coming into Kingstons Rest: that low, narrow bridge—halfway, with the tree canopy on both sides, and the first car sped up to get across. They’d already opened up a gap; suddenly they were far ahead. At that point I saw the gleam of a road train in the distance, coming in our direction: it was one of those explosives carriers heading for the Argyle project; it looked like a mirage in the morning light. And maybe that was it: nothing seemed quite real. Usually I was very careful on those roads: I knew that any drive on that stretch of highway was courting death. I used to always slow down, whenever I saw an oncoming vehicle. That morning, though, it was the other way—I was accelerating, as if I was anxious to keep up.

  ‘We reached the bridge: the road train was almost on us. I braked. Too late. I tried to reverse—but we were still going forward: the gears ground; they wouldn’t bite. The truck came rushing closer: it was high above us. I could see the driver’s face. And then everything stopped. Time disappeared. There was that slow motion, and clarity: knowing death had come. No sound. I looked across at Hector: how graceful and how frail and thin he was! He put up his hand, as if to stop the road train, and his hand looked like a magic wand—and at that instant, the impact came. I saw his body moving, riding the blow, like some dancer on the air. Then the sound came: glass breaking, a terrible twisting of metal; my head hitting something hard behind me. I could feel my blood on my body; I heard the motor winding up to screaming pitch, then dying. No more noise. Hector was quite untouched: he slipped out of the passenger-side door. I was barely able to pull myself out of the car; I lay down on the bitumen. There was blood pouring down my face. I could tell my ribs were shattered: my body had been torn apart. I struggled up on one shoulder, and lit a cigarette. Hector was leaning against a gum-tree trunk, close by, moving his hands above me; his lips were moving too, and he was staring down at me, and calling out my name. The sun’s heat grew stronger; the cicadas were screeching in the trees.

  ‘Cars drove up. The police, the ambulance. There were white clouds in the sky above, floating: they were the very same white clouds I saw as a five-year-old one day on the dairy farm. My eyes began to close. There was a beautiful feeling of peace, deeper and deeper; I was happy, happy to leave the world. I could barely hear the nurse yelling at me: Don’t go to sleep, don’t go to sleep, stay with us, she was shouting, and then the siren of the ambulance started up.’

  ‘And that’s all you remember?’

  ‘Weeks afterwards, the nurse came to see me. I was out of hospital by then: she told me no one understood what they’d seen that day. I had no blood pressure for several minutes in the ambulance on the drive in. They radioed ahead that I’d be dead on arrival at the hospital. The doctors went to work: it was touch and go. I had twenty-eight stitches for the wound in the back of my head—but when they laid me out on the operating table they found no damage to my ribs or side. They could see the blood all over me: but there was no break in the skin, no bruising, nothing. I knew something had happened to me. I found I was almost a stranger to myself: it took me three months to get back into my body; in the first few weeks I felt as if I was a ghost.’

  He fell quiet. We took the bend that leads up into the Cockburn Range. Throughout this recitation his voice had been hypnotic, rhythmic, low, as if he was recalling events from an impossibly distant time—I had been straining to hear his words, clinging to them, with the sense I was in danger of losing some vital thread—and each turn in the highway had seemed to mark a subtle shifting of the story’s mood and tone.

  ‘A good tale for the road—no?’ said Tony.

  ‘More carnage,’ I said.

  ‘In a sense—but life, as much as death. The two lie very close together here: that’s what shapes the country. I’ve always had the sense that things are stronger in the Kimberley than elsewhere: everything—colours, feelings, thoughts, regrets. It’s like a pressure chamber, this landscape—where the nature of the deal’s too clear to miss.’

  ‘The deal?’

  ‘Consciousness. Life. Life—that evil burden!’

  He was driving quite fast, by this stage. The safety barriers went flashing by. The dogs on the trayback were crouching down. Before us, the winding road to Wyndham stretched away.

  ‘See! The river estuaries and the salt flats, and the town. Wyndham. My perfect Wyndham! The Bastion lookout. The end of the line: where every dream fades to nothing.’

  He changed up, with a fluid movement. The shacks and houses of the Six Mile settlement drew near.

  ‘Are we in a hurry?’

  ‘Once I’m on the road, and I can see it up ahead, I long to get to Wyndham,’ he said: ‘I’ve always loved it. I even thought I might settle here.’

  ‘Wyndham! What’s the appeal? The clouds of malarial mosquitoes? The extremity of the heat? The past everywhere, pressing down?’

  ‘All those things—but above all, peace. It’s an even kind of a place.’

  ‘Everyone’s on the same level?’

  ‘Everyone’s scraping along happily on the bottom rung. Every time I drive this road, and I pass the airstrip, and the little camps and tin sheds, and I see the racetrack shimmering away, and I start trying to make out where the river starts and the mirage ends, I feel like I’m coming into an odd back-door paradise.’

  His voice had gone soft; he repeated these last words as if they had cast a spell on him:
once, twice. I gazed up. We were right beneath the Bastion peak. Abruptly, he turned off, and took the series of curves and switchbacks leading upwards: higher, higher; the road levelled—we reached the summit: he jumped out, and strode over to the edge. Before us, the panorama stretched away: the wide estuary, the winding rivers and their mud flats, the red cliffs and mesas, all softened by the cloud banks and the humid haze.

  ‘Come this way,’ he said. ‘Look down.’

  There, directly below, was the old port and its huddled, rundown houses; there were the fuel tanks, and the meatworks ruins and the scrapyards.

  ‘You can see it all, can’t you?’ he said: ‘Spread out before you! And what’s it saying? How weak and frail we all are. It’s the poetry of desolation. The whole town: the Durack store, the old Chinese shops on the main street, the shacks, the jetties. And see over there—that looming bluff, beyond the water: that’s the gorge that looks over Forrest River, where the old mission was, where the changes in this country began; and there, in that direction, where the fires are burning—keep going, along those hills: you reach Truscott Airbase, and Kalumburu. This is the real Kimberley. And look at that! Look now!’

  The sun had cleared the rangeline: its beams were filtering through dark build-up clouds. Thick light shafts were striking the surface of the water beneath us: they picked out the swirling current; they swept across the cliffs and mesas; the whole landscape seemed to shake and quiver; the texture of the light shifted and pulsed. Rain veils began falling in front of us. On the water below, a dredging boat was pushing slowly against the tide. There was a distant roar, from across the ranges, faint, almost like an echo.