—The whole bloody ménage eh. Why don’t you?
I could see Maureen across the room, actively conversing with one of the Marble sisters.
—It’s too much to ask, I told Jacko.
Yet I already knew I was going.
The night before Maureen and I left New York for the summer, I excused myself and foolishly went down to Tribeca to say goodbye to Jacko. Ringing at his bell in the cold doorway between the mercantile glitter of the Korean grocery and the warm lights of Mary O’Reilly’s, I heard an Australian voice, a woman’s on the intercom.
She said, The Emptors. Yes?
I said, Oh. Is Jacko in?
—Oh yes. I’ll press the button and you open it when you hear it buzzing.
Her instructions were so explicit that, quite clearly, in the more innocent world from which this voice came, such electronic arrangements were not needed. As I climbed the stairs, I wondered if it was one of the Logans, the one he said he had loved. Had she come to New York for a sabbatical now that Lucy was gone?
An athletic-looking woman was waiting at the head of the stairs, the door held open. She pointed Chloe Emptor’s face at me.
—Gidday. Helen. Jacko’s sister.
She closed the door behind me and took my overcoat, saying, Jesus, this New York’s a bit of a shock to the system eh.
She was smaller-boned than Jacko, and when she spoke Chloe’s grin appeared, dazzling and brief. She wore a track suit, but I could see the compactness of her figure. All Stammer Jack’s hulking DNA had been expended on Jacko and Petie; Frank and Helen had picked up Chloe’s lost beauty.
She led me through the open spaces of the loft towards the kitchen which was partitioned off with glass bricks. We found Jacko by the stove. He was wrapped in a bathrobe and was cooking omelettes with some pretensions of culinary style and much wrist-flicking. A tall, very thin man, red-bearded, fetched milk and butter from the refrigerator and was setting places at the kitchen bench. The place was so busy that there wasn’t room for any air of mourning for Lucy, yet a picture of Lucy and Jacko in front of the Grand Tetons was still stuck by a magnet to the refrigerator. Either he was very busy, or else he suffered from no anguish, no nostalgia for Lucy at all.
—This is Fitzie, Jacko said over his shoulder, both hands occupied, one with the Teflon skillet, the other with the egg-lifter. Fitzie and Helen are an item.
The tall, red-headed man shook my hand with little force.
—Fitzie and Helen are also bloody vegetarian abstainers, so I’m glad you’re here. We can open some wine.
Jacko began cracking even more eggs and cutting up more cheddar, determined I would eat with them. Since his dawns were still devoted to trespass, he was likely to eat a breakfast omelette at any time of the day.
We sat by the window which had the view of Coghlan’s. Jacko ate ferociously, talking with his mouth full. Fitzie sliced his omelette into small penitential morsels and Helen told us of her average experiences that day on the subway as if they were tales from the New Guinea highlands. You knew from the Chloe-like energy with which she told them that many people were going to hear these stories back in Australia. It was strange to see her with pale, lank Fitzie.
Fitzie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Western Australia, had met Helen in the pub in Hector, and she had followed him back to Perth. Fitzie had come to New York now to give some seminars at City College. It was on the way to City College and back that Helen had had her subway experiences.
—I’m going up to Burren Waters myself, I told her.
—Good for you, mate, said Jacko.
For Fitzie’s sake and Helen’s, and as a joke, he said, I think he’s like old Merv. He’s got a thing going with the old woman. With big Chloe. He’s the bloke who got Chloe in with Michael Bickham.
Fitzie’s cool, herbivorous eyes swept across me.
—That must have been a meeting made in bloody heaven, said Helen, uttering playful contempt for her mother in her mother’s voice. We’ll be up there too sometime over the winter. Getting ready for the excision hearing.
—Oh hell, said Jacko. Yes.
—The Wodjiri have made a claim on a place called Mongil, said Fitzie. I’m advocate for them.
—That’s right on Burren Waters leasehold, isn’t it? asked Jacko.
—That’s right, said Fitzie. They’re claiming a two square mile excision. But they’re willing to let Burren Waters’ cattle graze there.
Jacko began frowning.
—But the old woman tells me, he murmured, that stockmen won’t be able to go in there to get them out.
Fitzie, mincing his omelette with his fork, said quietly, They’ll be able to drive them out aerially it they want.
Helen said, Or wait for them to come out. Jesus, they’ve got cattle on Burren Waters they don’t even know about.
Jacko made a mouth. It was obvious he had little time for his sister. The way he asked his loaded questions in a false-naive voice made the conversation spiky.
He put down his plate and said, Well look, you know this will upset Chloe. Why don’t you talk them into picking some other spot? Eh Fitzie? Why don’t you do this legal work and give evidence for another tribe?
Fitzie said, I know it’s delicate as regards family and all, but the Wodjiri are my field of expertise. This is a massively important site, Jacko. It literally means the earth to these people. It’ll have no commercial impact on Chloe and Stammer Jack at all. I just wish they’d yield a bit on it, that’s all. It’s possible to arrange these things by consensus, you know. There’s no need at all for a hearing.
Jacko turned to Helen and said, You still want to get even with her, Helen.
Helen made a clicking noise with her lips and put down her plate of omelette.
—Well, said Jacko, I reckon you ought to pick on some other bloody cattle baron, rather than old Jack. Chloe thinks her kids are poison, and this’ll tend to prove her point.
Helen went through a looking-away-and-gathering-of-one’s-feelings process. Then, still staring out at Coghlan’s she said, This will be good for them, Jacko. This’ll expand their view of the question, and Christ knows they need it. I’m not doing this out of spite. It’s a case that has to be won. For everyone’s sake.
Fitzie put his plate down and asked quietly, Jacko, would you prefer we stayed somewhere else?
—Shit no, said Jacko. Just the same, I don’t care what your motives are, Helen. Chloe won’t understand them, so it’ll just seem cruel.
I wondered did he think all this would also rebound somehow on his safely removed Sunny and Delia and Lucy?
Helen said, The Wodjiri lost absolutely everything. No treaty, no money paid. Terra bloody nullius. No one’s land. And now it’s Stammer Jack’s land and he can’t afford to give up a square mile or two of it to keep a culture alive? I can’t believe that!
—Yeah, well, said Jacko.
I was very pleased to stand up then and plead packing, and to finish my wine as a token of serious departure. On my way across the enormous living room towards the door, Helen came with me and told me that if ever I was in Western Australia she hoped I would come and talk to some of Fitzie’s students.
It was the last I was to see of Jacko that season – in a bathrobe, gulping omelette and harried by his sister, and doing some harrying in return.
20
I realize now that my method of re-entry into Sydney was based on a simple plan: call Evans the playwright and his wife and ask them out to dinner with Maureen and myself, and then call Oscar Mulcahy and Hefty and make a time with them. In his calm, deep voice Evans could give you a total rundown on everything that happened in Australia during your absence. He did it without malice or a skewed view, and with hardly a touch of the waspishness which had made his plays famous.
Oscar gave a perhaps more partisan rundown. Like Bickham, Oscar ran a little more to jeremiads than weighing and measuring.
To Mulcahy, of course, Frank Emptor’s crimes wer
e simply another instance of the kind of thing you could expect from the sybarites of the opera, the ballet and the theatre.
—I wish I had a hundred dollars, said Oscar, for every time I gave the bastard his last sip of Château d’Yquem.
Evans wanted to write a play about Frank Emptor. He thought it was, in its way, a riot of a story.
It was peculiar, but, once I had spoken to these two, I felt I was thoroughly at home again, in the finest, most vinegary small-large pond in the world.
While I settled into Sydney that winter I found myself watching the Darwin and Alice Springs temperatures on the news every night. The monsoon season with its berserk humidity had long ended in the Top End, and in the deserts of the Centre the night temperatures were nudging freezing. Burren Waters was stuck between these two, on the desert’s hip, on the cusp of the tropics. It was impossible to look at the map and believe that all these temperatures were affecting the four women of whom no great amount had been heard, impossible to believe that Sunny Sondquist was breathing that air.
I was slightly nervous about confessing my intention to go up there to my wife. The problem I saw was not at all that I was going to investigate what had befallen the four women; it was more that I didn’t want her to believe that I was going up there purely because Jacko had asked me. Even though that was pretty much the case.
It was hard times for the newspaper business in Sydney now, since the great junk bond over-valuing of the early ’80s, but I talked a magazine editor I knew into sending me back to do a piece on the Northern Territory revisited. The fee would slightly more than cover my airfare and car hire.
My wife was too used to me to be fooled by my expressed journalistic intent. Just the same, I had found the equation by which I could go to Burren Waters without anyone losing face.
I managed to get a more or less direct flight. The long air route north-west towards Alice crossed the bare plains of what was, we are told, a receded ancient sea bed. The Finke lay empty and serpentine – some experts’ nomination for the oldest river on the planet.
From the window where I sat it seemed that the striations of the Simpson Desert looked sullen and heat-struck, secure in their reputation as a furnace even in winter. The question was: What had Sunny Sondquist made of this? Had the grave grey and tan of these spaces confirmed or soothed her fear of the immense?
A little turboprop aircraft took me from Alice to Hector. It touched down at Hector’s airstrip amidst the scrub and the tan mud ant-heaps tall as a man. I had a car ordered, and a four-hour journey ahead of me. After I drove through Hector, past the lines of disoriented Aboriginals who spent their days on the town’s pavements, I entered flat, scrubby, semi-desert country. It was country which, but for the ghost of Larson, I would have thought of as featureless.
I had forgotten to buy a supply of water in Hector, but consoled myself with the idea that the long road to Burren Waters from the highway was signposted. After three hours driving, a great swathe of red-grey sand veered away from the highway. The signpost to Burren Waters pointed unambiguously southwards along it.
In this country of rubble and sand and rubberbush, you could wonder what atavistic love of cattle made the English, Scots and Irish introduce them to such an unlikely venue. But someone had told me the country had been different before the hard-mouthed, hard-hoofed cattle ran here. Elderly Aboriginals who returned to their home territories wept to see the desolation the cattle had wrought.
On the dirt track into Burren Waters, I came at last to an unmarked fork. I paused and considered things. The leftward track seemed a lesser one, so I surmised that the right one led to Burren Waters homestead. I took it, dragging my great dragon of red dust behind me. I watched it in the rear-vision mirror. How solid the cloud was, and yet it threw a red mist of some delicacy over the rubberbush, the melaleuca and the desert boronia on either side of my wake.
But even spending half my time looking in the rear-vision mirror, I began to notice how my track was dwindling in front of me. It dipped into a dry water course, but seemed to widen hopefully beyond. Perhaps I could turn there if I chose to, and return to the fork and explore the other way a little. Because the dry creek bed looked slightly sandy, I got out and let some air out of the tyres of my hired Holden. All the truck drivers who delivered beer and groceries to the remote settlements did this when faced with possible bog in dry river beds.
The act of deflating the tyres one by one, making sure with a small pressure meter I carried that it was no more than five pounds per square inch, gave me a perhaps false but certainly grateful sense of being in control of my environment. I drove into the dry creek bed and almost at once felt my back wheels begin to spin in that terrible way.
—Okay, I said. Bugger you!
I got out and was pleased to see things were not hopeless. I fetched my tyre lever and dug the front side of the back tyres free, and then I went looking for branches of acacia, breaking them loose from the bushes and laying them in my tracks. I added into the branches some slabs of rock I found in the scrub on either side of the trail. It struck me now, of course, that even if I extracted myself, it would be very difficult to make a return journey. I had to go forward. If I tried to back out, I would only embed myself more deeply. At least if I went forward I would be more visible, up there on the far side.
—You know how to behave in the bush, I told myself, and the words now felt like hot stones in my mouth.
I tried to fight a surge of anger against Jacko. He had, in a way, harried me into coming here. He’d set my mind on finding the women, and not on practical things. And I had broken all the rules. Though Chloe knew I was on my way, I had not called Burren Waters from Hector about my expected time of arrival. I had not brought water. I had no way of replacing the water which dealing with the bog had taken out of me.
When I tried to drive out of the dry bed, coaxing the engine in first gear, inviting the back wheels to take purchase, all I felt was that malicious spinning again. The stern of the car shifted sideways, settling itself deeper still into sand.
Never leave the car, they say.
The sane ghost of Larson said, Never wander away. The Wodjiri will follow your tracks from the abandoned vehicle, but they’ll find you dead and bloated.
I got out of the car, looked at the rear and front wheels bogged to the axles, and went round to the shady side and hunched in the sand. I raised my eyes to the sky. I wanted to inform the firmament that a month ago I had been listening to the jazz saxophonist of Lower Broadway, and no one else who had stood within reach of that charming and plausible and full-throated instrument was now facing this. They might be sweltering in the subway, but there was a cool 7-Up in a dispensing machine available to them at the close of their small journey.
It would be beyond the belief of most of my colleagues at NYU that I had – again to use the Territorian word – perished so casually, in such a melodramatic way, by combining a few simple oversights.
My tongue sat in my mouth like a stone, but I made myself get the book I was reading out of my suitcase in the boot, sit down again and read. It was Madame Bovary, a good book to be found dead with. Dr Bovary’s infatuated wife had got up in the summer pre-dawn, and left her nightcap and sleeping husband, and travelled through the pastures and the crops of summer flowers to encounter her noble lover, who was already bored with her ardent breath and many letters. This was the sort of book a person read too young, the sort of book you always said you’d read if asked, but about which, because when you’d read it you lacked the right emotional gearing, you knew you were somehow lying.
While I read a few pages of the thing, a map of the country around me built in my brain. I was certain now I should have taken the other fork, but the two roads couldn’t have diverged far from each other yet. The other one might be only four or five miles eastward. Surely no one could perish in five miles?
Other bush questions came up, though considering them didn’t give me the same sense of being an insider to t
he rules of the Territory that my deflating of the tyres had. Should I go now, when there might be some chance of day-time traffic – Stammer Jack or the accountant or some of the Aboriginal stockmen might have been to Hector. Or elders might be deporting a Chloe-banned woman like Muriel. Or should I wait till dusk, when it was cooler?
I told myself that I needed to rest, and I lay in the hot shade and flung poor old Flaubert aside. But my brain was driving away feverishly, sifting possibilities and settling on no option, not even in any definite way on the option of staying where I was.
A further map had formed in my head. Was there a road to the west as well? I seemed to remember one. I’d once flown with Boomer, passing a series of tracks westward, and on some of them stood the occasional stockman’s huts for use during mustering. I believed Boomer had said there were rudimentary supplies there, and water tanks.
So it was not cool-headedness which kept me by my rented Holden. It was the equal pull of these two maps. I was stuck mid-way between them, in a furious inertia, like a nail halfway between two magnets. I could feel that coarse toad, the tongue, bloating to take up all available room. I saw myself leathered.
I remembered a Northern Territory cop I’d known once who had been looking for a German gone missing in a fourwheel drive somewhere west of Ayers Rock. He hadn’t found the man on the first trip, nor on the second one the following month, nor on the third. But on the fourth he found him on the Sandy Blight track, a road which ran north along the Northern Territory-Western Australian border. The cop believed that the German’s radiator had clogged with spinifex grass seeds, which had caused it to boil again and again, and the German traveller had used up all his water feeding the radiator. When dying of thirst, he had shot himself in the neck. By the time the cop found him the sun had completely tanned him. He sat upright, the colour of mahogany, his flesh tough as a cricket ball. From the wound in his neck, said the cop, a beetle had busily emerged.
It seemed I fell asleep, floating out in severe space, in air of such low gravity that the blood boiled at any suggestion of warmth. When I woke, the dust amongst the rubberbushes was turning mauve. I acknowledged too late that Larson was right. This was miraculous, this colour, but it couldn’t be touched. It had no moist connection with my body.
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