Dark Roots

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘Hey, Mum. Watch this.’ Emma gives the baby a wooden spoon. Rachel gazes on that new body, that unsullied flesh free of tattoos, studs, scars and piercings, dings, bruises, inoculation and stretch marks. Just wait, she thinks tranquilly, holding those kicking, uncalloused feet.

  Jerry, up all night, has spent the morning playing a selection of records, making a bedtime tape — Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas and the Papas, Queen and Bananas in Pyjamas. The room has crashed to Bohemian Rhapsody. Now it is silent. Rachel listens but can hear nothing, stands gazing at the astonishing, abrupt fact of the baby before her.

  ‘She looks like the Dalai Lama,’ says Emma, ‘only new.’

  The baby grapples with the wooden spoon’s handle with industrious concentration, waves it gently, staring gravely at her observers, her small, devoted audience.

  ‘Look,’ says Rachel. ‘She’s conducting.’

  Take me anywhere, she prays silently and fiercely into the invisible music. Take me anywhere at all.

  Direct Action

  Direct action. You don’t want to hear it. You want to make another pot of tea, and wait for Star Trek: The Next Generation to come on. Direct action means arguing with punters on the street who try to pull your placards off you, and dancing round the missile base so that the cops can laugh themselves sick before they move in on you. It’s something you admire hearing about second-hand, shaking your head at someone else’s bruises. It’s not something you feel like doing, on a cold winter’s night after dinner. Except that you can’t stop thinking that right now, after dinner or not, and all through tonight, and tomorrow, twenty-four hours a day, in fact, seven days a week, Barron Paper Mills, just up the road, are glugging industrial effluent straight into the river.

  Picketing? The laundry is full of pickets. STOP TOXIC SPILL, they say. THE PLANET IS NOT YOUR TOILET. And so on. Barron executives, accustomed to paying big dollars to give toilet paper a good image, have an Environmental Impact Study saying that the effluent falls within acceptable levels of toxic contamination. Life seems full of acceptable levels now. I myself fall into the acceptable level of thirteen per cent of qualified tradespeople unable to find employment. I’ve stood knee-deep in the sludge twenty metres down from the dual-emission outlet pipes and been asked by well-pressed retirees just off to the pokies why I haven’t got a job. Because they’ve closed. They laid me off. I worked for four years, let me show you my certificate and union card. No point screaming. No point even answering. There’s a photo of us ‘Direct Action’ campaigners, cut out of the local rag and brown and oil-splattered now, on the fridge. We look puny and pale in our rolled-up jeans, holding dead fish, and every time I pass it I can’t help cringing at the headline ‘Ecowarriors’ — saving the public the trouble of jeering at us by doing it myself.

  I observe the comforting sight of the Enterprise going where no one has gone before (used to be no man but see how non-sexism has changed the world), sip my tea and watch Riker dispensing Klingons. Glug, glug, goes the effluent two kilometres away, unstoppable, poisonous, irreversible. This time of night it slows to a trickle, by 9.30 in the morning it’s like the North Sea pipeline.

  ‘I’m providing jobs,’ the executive from Barron had argued with me as I stood in the river that morning, knowing where to hit the nerve. I had an answer ready but couldn’t trust my voice, or my hand holding the rotting fish. He’d sneered at my ‘Vegetarians of the World Unite’ T-shirt.

  ‘Sure you’ve got your priorities straight, son?’ he’d said, and when I still didn’t answer, he’d said, ‘Come on, speak up, moron’, and I’d thrown the fish, and there’d been trouble.

  Sometimes Monday mornings I still jump awake at 6.45 and go to roll out of bed before realising there’s no whistle to get up for. It’d be a long bike ride to work anyway, even if I’d kept my job, since the factory is now in Macau. Some other poor bastard’s starting up the oxytorch now, checking his mask and checking his back. People used to ask for me at the workshop. ‘Get a skill and you’ll always be in demand,’ is something my Dad used to say, and he believed it too, until they retired him. He says he doesn’t miss the work. Tells me this in the middle of his shed, which has more tools in it than Mitre 10. His face lighting up when a neighbour brings their car over, hurrying for a spanner, telling them it’s no trouble.

  ‘Cheer up, Gaz,’ is what he says now. ‘It’s not you, son. There’ll be an opening for a skilled bloke sooner or later.’

  I have a plan. My only visible direct action thus far is stepping for the first time in fourteen years into a butcher shop. Two dollars’ worth of bones, paper bag please, not plastic. I go every day for two weeks. The butcher becomes my friend. All day he bashes up the carcasses of dead things, and I’ve never seen the smile off his face. Now there’s a puzzle for you.

  ‘Dad,’ I say, ‘I need to borrow the oxy.’

  His face brightens. He heaves himself off the Recliner Rocker. ‘Got a job on, son?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘That’s the way.’ He pads out to the shed, checks the set in the box.

  ‘You wouldn’t have a few bits of steel plate lying around, would you?’

  ‘How big?’

  I indicate with my hands.

  He stops, thinks. ‘I just might, out the back.’

  My dad, recycler since 1963. He returns, his arms weighted.

  ‘You could patch a hole on the Queen Mary with these.’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘Hang about while I get you a couple of welding rods.’

  He putters about, putting his hand on everything he wants, competent, cheerful. He would have had fifteen years more productive time in him at the garage, given a chance. He could have trained the apprentice who replaced him. Now he is on the scrapheap, and his response is to make something useful with the scrap.

  ‘I think the bottle’s pretty full,’ he says, checking it.

  ‘Great. Thanks.’

  ‘Good on yer, Gary. It’s like I told you — there’s always an opening for a bloke with skills.’

  ‘One or two, still,’ I say, hefting the box.

  And I’m almost at the door before he says in a voice just a degree or two cooler, ‘So, what’s the job, then?’

  Sprung, I turn around and walk back.

  ‘Remember that time we went fishing in the Hootie?’

  ‘Sure I do.’ He’s fiddling with the welding rod, putting it into the vice, turning the handle. Listening.

  ‘Remember when I caught that brown trout?’

  There are things I hope my father remembers from my childhood; about three big things. One was the day he pushed me off, minus training wheels, on my first two-wheeler — a low-slung green dragster — and suddenly I was steering and pedalling and the bike was staying upright, and I sneaked a quick look behind me and my dad was jumping down the track, punching the air with triumph. Another time was when I’d fixed a tiny leak in our Clarke’s backyard swimming pool with my bike repair kit. My father had taken a few short steps towards the repair, stopped, considered, and looked at me with what an eight-year-old boy could only take for respect.

  And, last of all, in lit-up focus in my memory, there was the fishing. Me with my rod from Santa, my father with an old rubber lure designed to catch a fourteen-pound Murray cod on the South Australian rivers in the 1950s. Did I tell you he never threw anything away?

  We had been fishing for an hour, not saying anything, when there was a bang on my rod like a bailiff’s knock and the K-mart plastic bent like a horseshoe and my father whooped with sudden childlike excitement. His hands flew out to grab the rod, then slowly went back into his pockets, where they rolled and twitched as he instructed me how to reel the fish in, his teeth clenched. It was a big brown trout, just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and my father’s ‘you little beauty’ fell on my head li
ke a benediction.

  The trout lay there drowning in the air, and I could see the miraculous gills opening and closing, its eyes moving as it gulped the wrong element, two old scars on its big mottled back, and then everything slowed down and I reached my fingers, fumbling with agonised realisation, into the trout’s mouth to get that hook out, and I snatched the fish up in both hands and threw it back into the water. The absolutely silent moments when it was flexing and shining in the air over the brown water lasted for years, and while I waited for it to hit I felt something come loose in my chest, emerge, test the air and flap away in big white beats.

  I want my father to remember this day, the last day I ever fished.

  ‘There aren’t any brown trout in the Hootie now, Dad.’

  He examines the edge on a chisel, rubs it up and down a scar on his thumb. ‘There’s not much of anything any more, son. Not that kind of thing.’

  ‘They’re pouring emission straight into the water down there, from two pipes hanging out over the bank.’

  He tests the chisel, nodding slowly as he works out what I want his welding gear for. ‘They’re pouring human shit straight into the ocean, too,’ he says, pinning me with a glance, ‘but I haven’t noticed you welding your arse shut.’

  The moment twists in the air, seconds away from the wet smack of too late.

  ‘If you’re not going to lend it to me, just say.’

  He slides the chisel carefully back into its slot in his box. Sighs. Fumbles for the metre to check the levels in the acetylene tank.

  Rome was attacked by Gallic troops in 390 BC and what raised the alarm that saved the city? Geese. The holy geese in the city’s temple started up and the invaders couldn’t quieten them and Rome woke up to itself. I read this in an article titled ‘Microlivestock: Little-known Small Animals with a Promising Economic Future’, along with the information that geese are used now to guard missile bases in Europe. Geese. They just raise the alarm and gabble away and don’t shut up, and you would be mistaken if you didn’t take that seriously, standing there with your sabotage tools and camouflage gear on. This is the kind of information I would never have learned about in my old job. You get a fair bit of reading in when you’re unemployed.

  Barron’s four German Shepherds bounce down to the fence when they see me, the bringer of midnight snacks for two weeks. Barron Paper Mills has made two great mistakes in the protection of its plant. One, it has installed dogs of a famously aggressive breed, but it has neglected to train them because it thinks their presence is a deterrent in itself. Two, they have fed these dogs on dry dog-kibble and water. The first night I pushed four kilos of lamb shanks through the wire, the dogs’ barking switched off like someone had pulled the plug. They glanced up at me as they dropped their heads to it with a look so sentient, so conspiratorial, it was breathtaking. One of them, I swear, winked.

  Fourteen nights later, our transaction is as businesslike as a drug deal. Through the cyclone-wire mesh goes eight kilos of beef ribs sliced up on the butcher’s bandsaw. Inside the nightwatchman’s room, the guard sleeps through Letterman. The bark of the dogs would wake him. But the dogs don’t bark. They’re dumb, but not that dumb. They give me quick leery dog smiles. I am Dog Santa. Then they barrel off into the darkness, meat and drool trailing from their mouths. I cut the wire close to a pole, where the flap snaps back invisibly. Barron, you should have invested in geese.

  As I move just inside the lights on the fence perimeters, behind the factory towards the pipeline, I’m thinking of my father’s hands, pushed down into his pockets like he was holding down foam buoys, clenching and jumping in there, torn between taking something and giving it away. The fingers that could reach in behind a spinning fanbelt and locate a nut and adjust it precisely. My own hands that used to be hard with a smattering of burns and marks but now are soft, with clean fingernails. Want to know what someone does for a living, check their hands. Hold out yours, shake theirs, and you’ll know everything you need to know. I’m puffing, out of condition, fingers tired already from just cutting the wire. Watch out world, here comes Mr Activist.

  Hoisting myself down through blackberries to the pipes, I breathe easier now, 150 metres from the building. The oxy, when I light it, sounds a solid hiss of hot energy, like a gas lamp out in the bush — loud as a roar, it seems to me. I turn the flame, pull down my mask. It smells like an honest day’s work, a smell I haven’t quite forgotten yet.

  It takes me an hour, but I was never one to rush a job. I lean into the blackberries, my boot wedged into poisoned riverbank. Those radiant blue chips waterfall off the metal like the fireworks we used to nail to the fence back before you needed to be a qualified pyrotechnician to handle them. Catherine wheels, spinning molten stars, my mum lighting the whole packet, every one different.

  My back starts to protest and the scratches down my legs smoulder. I know what I’m doing, though. I’m welding metal together, watching the solder grey and cool in a neat permanent join even as I move to the next section, twisted around a waste pipe in the darkness, hearing the liquid inside sizzle against the heat as the pipe fills slowly, finishing off the second plate, hunched against a riverbank I once caught a fish off. By tomorrow morning, the guy I threw the fish at will crank up his machinery and things will slowly seize in a white-hot and expensive flooding. His ruined two-hundred-dollar shoes will splash him out of the swill, into head office to call the police.

  Stepping back now around the manicured grass, every second expecting the sliding blue and red lights of a cop car and the android crackle of their voices over the radios to greet me at the road, I swallow nothing again and again. The taste of nickel, of smoking solder in my mouth. But there is just the night there, grey and woolly and incomprehensible like I’ve just woken up into it. I’m still wearing my welding mask, hobbling as the muscles in my legs start stiffening up. The dogs, breathing meaty breath onto me, fawn around, coming out of the darkness and leaping up at me, their brains addled with protein and low-IQ self-interest. I am covered with oily sludge from the emission pipes, and saliva from the sated dogs.

  Barron, neglecting dog training, did however splash out on surveillance cameras. As I unwittingly pass one’s red-eyed field of vision I am thinking only of getting home. But two days later in the paper there is a blurry photo of something that looks like Bigfoot under a story in which Barron executives cite figures that they say have cost the whole community dearly. Mindless and malicious sabotage that affects the reputation of Australian business both at home and abroad. They cite their Environmental Impact Study, their acceptable levels, their state-of-the-art corporate workplace agreement policies.

  The cops take one look at the job, and start looking for welders with a history of disturbing the peace.

  It’s a small field of contenders, and it doesn’t take them long.

  They have the photo when they come over to my place, and one of them looks at it and gives a little smile at the blurry figure emerging out of the dark in the big, black welding mask, both hands raised and holding cylinders. I know what he is thinking. The resemblance has struck me, too.

  ‘Stand and deliver, eh?’ he says to me, and we both grin. He’s the kind of bloke I’d buy a beer.

  ‘Tell ’em I died game,’ I say. I get a ride in a police car for my trouble.

  Outside the court, what the press is fond of calling a small but vocal group of protestors has assembled, and the posters out of the laundry are in action again. There is ragged cheering as I make my way through.

  There have been questions, which Barron’s media releases have answered with an increasing note of self-righteousness. The press aren’t given a gift like this — a toilet-paper manufacturer — every day, and they don’t waste it. There are also headlines in the ‘Something Fishy?’ vein, showing journalists frowning thoughtfully at a high-tide mark of solid scum. Barron execs have posed nervously for photos aro
und the new pipes with filter attachments and released their sudden altruistic intention to create a waterbird sanctuary upstream, but their spin doctors, deep into damage control, have kicked a bit of an own goal with their new slogan.

  ‘We’re here to clean up!’ doesn’t do them any favours at all.

  Me, I am dubbed ‘The Man of Steel’. I am in the Odd Spot.

  ‘Name?’ I am asked in the courtroom.

  ‘Gary Sutherland.’

  ‘And your profession?’

  ‘Welder.’

  The prosecutor gives me a now-come-on look. ‘Wouldn’t it be more correct to say you are unemployed?’

  ‘Yes, I am unemployed.’

  ‘And have been on unemployment benefits for well over two years?’

  It’s funny, but I’m not even angry. ‘It would be more correct to say I am a qualified welder,’ I say, ‘who does not have a job.’

  As they read the charge, the noise outside increases into one of those clapping call-and-response chants. From inside it sounds a bit like a herd of distant honking, just between you and me. I smile.

  The river doesn’t look any cleaner. Some days green algae makes it look solid as a billiard table; some days it’s black as Ned Kelly’s eyes. There will still never be any fish in it. That part of our lives is over, mostly. This is what occurs to me as I am charged that day in court: that there aren’t enough moments of fumbling to pull out the hook, our hands no longer move independently of our heads. But as I walk out, I catch sight of my father, down the back, head up, worth ten of the bastards in suits. The look he has in his eye is not the one he had when I caught the fish.

  It is the look he had when I let the fish go.