Margie, a veteran of improbable events, a woman regularly sent sliding back down the social ladder by her husband’s fantastic doings, stood her ground. She shovelled the red coals out of the black nests they’d made in her carpet and back into the fire and then knelt before the smoking head with the cool eye of a crash scene investigator. Ogling and sniffing she soon came to the conclusion it was the head of a mighty fish. A Murray cod. It lay there gaping, giving off the same heartbreaking wisps of smoke as her social standing. ‘Oh, Bruce,’ I heard her whisper. Then I stood up from behind the sofa and said, ‘One of those old ladies said, “Fuck”.’ This seemed to cheer her up. To know that one of these grand dames’ deportment had slipped in the crisis, that one had something to answer for.
Lucky had caught the fish months before up on the Murray on a springer, an untended line left attached to a sapling and baited with a live carp. Illegal, needless to say. A monster hundred and forty pound cod. He’d lowered its head down the chimney on binder twine to smoke it and then been called away to other duties. The occasional hint of putrefaction descending into the living room in the following months hadn’t reminded him of the cod’s head. He thought George his German shorthaired pointer was sourly flatulent.
The binder twine caught alight just as Lady Frampton was beginning to roast one of my aunts in parable and the fish fell with the aunt only half cooked, just as Lady Frampton was saying that with Newcastle being such a large, blue-collar Gomorrah it was just possible my Aunty Liza may not have been the most devious trollop that ever issued from it … but she was unquestionably in the top half dozen.
Lady Frampton must have thought the fish’s head was the head of the aunt currently being ranked among the infamous trollops of Newcastle, thinly disguised in blackface and wide-mouthed with a vengeful rage. Because on her way out of the room as she made for her Roller with her rheumatically dilapidated knees taking my sofa at a hurdle, I heard her squeak a panicked apology to Liza and a retraction of the Newcastle trollop stats and offer up an olive branch by saying Aunty Liza was probably only just inside the top fifty.
He was arrested by sudden enthusiasms, Lucky. In one he hired a water diviner to come out and find a subterranean reservoir on his orchard. Bugger paying over the odds for the meagre water allocations the shire served up. Those days are over, Lucky. A guy in a faded Bedford truck rolled up. He had the look of a late-blooming prophet about him, the look of a bloke who’d failed at too many occupations, been found wanting at a dispiriting number of minor, mundane tasks and become known to family and friends as a worthless shit kicker, until discovering a surprising superannuation selling dreams of Eden to gullible cockies.
He climbed out of his truck in baggy shorts holding his bent piece of wire like a piece of the true cross and insisted we stand at some distance so as not to interfere with its ‘directionals’. ‘How far back do you want us?’ Dad asked. ‘Bearing in mind the boy just drank a can of Fanta.’ Dad loved nothing better than to witness hokery like this. The diviner, without any hint he knew he was being mocked, pointed at a place a hundred yards away. ‘Over by them palms should do. Never find water near palms.’ This flew in the face of everything I knew about oases from reading of Arabian adventures. Dad jabbed me in the ribs and winked at me. Pay close attention to this shyster – and to Lucky. Both are in on this. One is the dupe and one the conman. Both willing, in their way. Water won’t be found. Excuses will be given. At some point Lucky’s belief will falter and he will turn into a sceptic, hands on his hips and leaning back with a sneer on his lips. This will be fun. Dad’s rib jab readied me for the full arc of the play.
Harry the Diviner wandered around with his bent wire held out before him wincing and frowning like a widow at a séance with strong info teeming in from another sphere. He was pulled along by invisible currents of something or other beyond explaining. He’d take a series of rapid steps in one direction, then stalk slowly, high-kneed, in another as if coming up on a sleeping lake from behind. From time to time he would stop and kick the heel of his boot backward into the dirt making a divot and telling Lucky, ‘Don’t lose that spot. That’s a hotspot that spot.’
‘Righto, Lucky.’ Lucky would hustle to his ute and get an empty longneck or a car jack and stand it upright in the divot to mark the hotspot. Lucky was, at this stage, a convert, with all the convert’s slavish determination to please his new priest.
Mid-afternoon Harry the Diviner leaned up against his truck mudguard, dramatically exhausted from feeling the earth’s pulse, or calling forth the traces of hydraulic energy, or just from playing the lead role in a farce. He huffed and puffed to show this wasn’t kid’s play, this remorseless stalking of timid reservoirs, this drawing of treasure maps to riches of water.
There were about a dozen items taken from Lucky’s ute standing in heel divots around his orchard by now. He’d hired a drill and an operator from Tatura and the man sat high in his seat and set about auguring down through the topsoil to the water. He’d drilled eight holes to his deepest reach while we looked on and he’d been unrewarded with even a smear of mud on his drill.
And it was like Dad had said it would be, only it took longer to get that way. By evening there were pyramids of drilled red clay across Lucky’s orchard and the driller was shaking his head and Harry the Diviner was scratching his head and pouting his lips in a practised way and Lucky was leaning back with his hands on his hips looking at Harry the Diviner with a sneer on his lips. ‘Harry the Diviner?’ he asked out loud into the evening’s redness. ‘Harry the Fuckin’ Bullshit Artist,’ he answered.
This was the denouement of another Simson farce. A day splendidly spent. ‘Righto, Ans,’ Dad whispered to me. ‘Into the car, we’d better go.’
Adrenaline was the problem. Lucky read about it in what he called a scientific journal but was probably nothing more than the barstool musings of a retired plumber. ‘Adrenaline’s the problem, Lucky. By the time a beast has been trucked to the saleyards and then the abattoir and finally got the bolt between the eyes the bastard’s been scared witless about eight times and had eight tides of adrenaline flush through its system. It’s adrenaline that toughens the meat. Killing a beast unawares, Lucky … that’s the secret. Take it from a distance, like a sniper. Dead before it knows it, Lucky. A gentle death equals tender meat.’
To get around the scourge of adrenaline Lucky had bought a steer and let it loose in his orchard to feed among the pears. He’d arranged the death and organised a local bloke who advertised himself on the cork pin-up board of the local pub as Jack the Butcher to dismember the beast. Whereupon Lucky would parcel out the steaks and snags and roasts to whoever bought into the scheme. Those of us lucky enough to be involved were going to have five-star beef at a quarter its usual cost. Dad bought into the scheme. Not, I think, for tender meat, as much as for an interesting Saturday. If so, he was the only one who got what he paid for.
We assembled on a Saturday morning. Dad and Guy and I drove out to Ardmona where we met Barrel, who had his man Donny with him. Donny hung around as a sort of vassal who would pick up things Barrel dropped or go back for things Barrel forgot or agree with things Barrel said or get on his back on liquid-hot bitumen to look under Barrel’s jeep when Barrel asked, ‘What’s that ticking noise, Donny?’ on a January day. Barrel was, in a small-town sense, grand, and needed a valet or gofer. Donny currently filled the role. His gofers didn’t last long – he worked them hard and they were pretty soon disfigured in a semi-industrial accident or disenchanted in a semi-permanent way.
There were also a couple of dark-skinned Italians on hand who had some arrangement with Lucky to be at his beck and call when he becked or called. No one knew their names because Lucky just called them ‘Lucky’ when talking to them individually or ‘the Arabs’ when referring to them collectively.
Lucky was a crack shot but didn’t generally waste his rarefied marksmanship on his own livestock. He handed the .22 to Guy. ‘Go on, Lucky. Walk up close and hit him in t
hat hollow right behind the ear. He’ll drop like a bag of shit.’
We all heard the bullet ricochet off the beast’s horn stump and go whining through the pear trees. The steer shook its head and blinked as if it had heard something entirely incomprehensible, high calculus or foul gossip. Guy cranked the bolt and let another shot go and it hit the beast right in its reservoir of adrenaline, I guess, and the stuff flooded out and made a supercow. The thing became a grey bawling blur. Lucky snatched the rifle from Guy and shot it twice more as it disappeared among the trees, but you can shoot a supercow with a .22 a lot of times before it takes off the cape and becomes a Clark Kent cow again.
Dad had seen a lot of this type of thing. It was as if Lucky’s schemes were an endless train of idiocy and the engine had jumped the tracks in the fifties ensuring all the carriages would follow, one by one, down the years. ‘I’m a bloody fool,’ he said to no one. Then shouted, ‘I’ll be waiting in my car, Lucky.’
Lucky understood that Dad was weighted by the terrible millstone of the law around his neck. ‘Right you are, Lucky,’ he called back. There followed a confusing hunt through the orchard, the occasional crackle of gunfire and swearing in Italian and English. Eventually the Italians began to call to us. ‘The Arabs’ve got him cornered, Lucky,’ Lucky shouted. We closed in stealthily. The beast had been brought to bay in a corner of a paddock up against a barbed-wire fence alongside a service station owned by Lucky but leased by Arabs (Greeks, I think, in this case) right on the Midland Highway. It was bleeding like a machine-gunned water tank and drooling white strings of foam and staring our way white-eyed as a Biblical prophet. You couldn’t have crammed any more adrenaline into the animal with a hypodermic needle and a fire pump.
One of Lucky’s Arabs had the gun now and he bounced a round off the thing’s skull that you could track across the highway by its whine as it intersected the cars filled with mums and dads driving their kids to Saturday cricket and netball. He fired again and missed the beast altogether and this round hit the side of a passing truck, which stilled my mind momentarily and made me blink and wonder if I should be back in the ute with Dad. I too, had a future to consider. Geelong Grammar. Serious, important people who would surely look askance at the random slaughter of motorists on my CV.
Barrel calmly slapped the gun out of the Arab’s hands and observed, ‘You’re a dangerous little bastard, aren’t you.’ Lucky picked it up and let the scene settle. The steer stood huffing in its carapace of gore, all its run gone, the coup de grâce was coming, expected, needed.
Lucky brought the gun up as gracefully as a man with a heart rate of a hummingbird and a looming custodial sentence can, and I watched his finger whiten on the trigger … but now a buzz, rising, rising, a throb, rising still, tending to a roar … a Hell’s Angel came east along the Midland Highway and swooped into the servo alongside the petrol pump with the kinetic swagger of a pro surfer. The roar of his Harley brought a black fear back to the steer’s eyes and it took off again and Lucky blew a fuse. As the Angel shut his bike down and swung his leg to the ground Lucky ran at him hollering, waving his gun above his head. The man in leather paused – is that pot-bellied guy in shorts and gumboots yelling at me … shaking that rifle at me?
Lucky fired a shot that skipped across the concrete pan of the servo and punctured the air hose people used to inflate their tyres, making it a live and angry viper that whipped the biker viciously at crotch height hammering his testicles. With an armed, pot-bellied fruitcake running at him, and being flogged in the privates by a rubber hose with a mind of its own, the Angel leapt aboard his Harley and accelerated toward Shepparton with the hounds of Hell riding pillion. I guess in hindsight he justified this to himself as a tactical retreat, and I suppose he explained his bruised gonads and welt-covered cock as a symptom of some orgy of over-eager barmaids and horny strippers.
They found the beast dead back among the trees. Lucky stood over it swearing about Hell’s Angels as if that criminal clique had been responsible for ruining a perfectly good plan. ‘Lucky?’ I asked him. ‘Is all that red stuff blood or adrenaline? If it’s adrenaline I think we might be okay. I think we might have drained the beast.’
‘Get fucked, Lucky.’ I was young. But he knew me.
No one held out hopes for the meat now. But Jack the Butcher came and collected the steer and butchered it. When he told Lucky the cost over the phone Lucky shouted at him, ‘Jack the Butcher? Jack the Fucking Robber!’ So none of us got to eat the meat. Because, who was going to eat foodstuffs supplied by a bloke you’d insulted? As if he wouldn’t have rubbed our T-bones all over some orifice.
Our only compensation, and it lasted for years, was imagining Jack the Butcher and Little Jack the Butcher Kid and Jill the Butcher Wife and Joy the Toothless Butcher Mother in Law trying to chew that meat marinated in adrenaline and made into indestructible supercow sirloin.
When I was ten, somehow, there was a new sister. It was casually mentioned to me, as I sipped my evening pint of chocolate milk from a pint pot stolen by Dad from the King’s Head and Eight Bells when he was practising law in London, that there was happy news and that the happy news was Mum was with child. She wasn’t. She was with an amorphous little gatecrasher who knew no better than to break into a settled domesticity squealing like a piglet on a roller-coaster and monopolise the parental delight that had once been mine.
What were they thinking? Guy was seventeen and had finally been expelled from Geelong Grammar for dangling a friend from the clock tower so he could paint ‘BEGGARS’ BANQUET’ on its side. The sign was mocking a party the Masters were planning. The hardest thing about that piece of student activism was, he later said, teaching Rankin, who was swinging from a condemned rope ninety feet in the air, where to put the apostrophe. Guy was born bristling anti-authoritarian impulses and had finished school early, unrepentant, with those impulses intact.
Debbie and Vicki were discovering and flexing womanly appetites. So they came and went from the best private schools regularly, suspended and expelled for this or that debauchery. Some mornings I’d bump into Dad down at Guyatt’s Garage filling up the Fairlane in the middle of the day when he should have been at the office. ‘Off to Geelong, Dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which one?’
‘Vicki.’
‘What for?’
‘None of your business.’
‘See you tonight, Dad.’
I’d spend the next week trying to get Vicki to tell me what she’d done to get sent home this time. My parents paid years of boarding school fees for girls who were upstairs listening to Suzi Quatro and painting their nails.
It was clear Debbie and Vicki’s school days were coming to an end and that nothing could be expected of them afterward but the type of lazy criminality thought up while plastered on Blue Nun moselle and sucking Alpine cigarettes so hard they crackled like cellophane.
I hadn’t even left the preparatory playground of Shepparton for the real world of Geelong Grammar and my siblings were all returning, spurned by the greater life. I was, of course, cut from far finer cloth than they. That is … I had an unassailable sense of my own importance that I hoped fine schools and Australia’s best-bred children warranted.
But it was obvious to me the family was nearly done. Nearly over. Everyone had new interests and everyone was making plans to move on. Mum and Dad were at a frosty distance, arguments flaring. And Justina Gaye was born into this on an evening I was making ginger beer. I was known for my ginger beer. I brewed it once a month just to hear the profound ‘Ahhs’ and the heartfelt ‘Oohhoohoos’ Dad would give off after he walked home for lunch on a hot day and swallowed a mouthful of it. To see the way he held up the half-empty glass, turning it in his hand as if it were the signature elixir of some famed magician, was to know you had a place in the world. My ginger beer saved his life about once a week judging by the things he said in its praise.
Gran and Grampy were out from England so she could be on hand to he
lp with the new child. I didn’t see what help she could be. She hated children. But she was a good lawn mower. The old trout could take summer heat. Sit her on a rider mower and she’d travel round and round soaking up the Australian sun and sucking on Rothmans cigarettes as if it were a holiday treat akin to skiing the French Alps. You couldn’t burn the woman. Our lawns were just rough paspalum and they didn’t grow in summer. But they grew in her head, so she mowed them on our mower.
Dad came to me while I was bottling the latest batch of ginger beer and told me I had a new sister called Justina Gaye. It seemed a stupid name even then. The sort of thing a poof would yell if he was having sex when his doorbell rang. ‘Hang on a mo, I’m just in a gay.’ Everyone else in the family was allowed to go visit Mum and her new toy at hospital, but I was, at a venerable ten, deemed too young. I had to stay home with Grampy.
His stories of aerial combat against the Hun in his Sopwith Camel usually enthralled me. He was an actual Englishman who had flown against actual Germans in the First War and duelled with the Red Baron, a sneering Kraut assassin I’d wanted to get to grips with myself for some years. This night, perhaps sensing a special need, he let me run my fingertips across the scar on his forehead where a member of the Red Baron’s Flying Circus had grazed him with a machine-gun bullet. ‘Two flying machines,’ he told me. ‘Move either of them an inch in another direction … not only would I be dead … so would your mum … so would you and Guy and Debbie and Vicki …’
‘And so would Justina Gaye,’ I said while smiling.
A few days later they brought the thing home and sang its praises into whatever moment wasn’t taken up with more immediate tasks; how beautiful she was, how lost we’d be without her, what a gift, what a wonder. I checked them with sneaky glances when they thought I wasn’t watching, just to see if they were kidding. But they were deadly serious. They’d flipped. And this stuff went on for years. ‘Isn’t she a wonder, Ans?’ ‘Where would we be without her?’ ‘No’ and ‘Right here but twice as happy’ were my silent answers to these questions.
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