Nice Shootin' Cowboy

by Anson Cameron

  He just looks around at the trees and I have myself a silence long enough for the peaceful dove to sound into four times before Porous breaks it by asking is it hot enough for us all today, or what?

  Mum and Dad fly down to Perth and become spectators at a life and death auction where the bids are for him. The first bid is by his oncologist who says the dose of chemo needed would be toxic to a seventy-eight kilo sexagenarian. He bids death. Two days later his thoracic surgeon calls this ‘the usual negativism’. Says there are hundreds of people living normal lives right now with half a stomach and a soporific nature. Just a matter of removing what’s bad and leaving what’s good. He bids life.

  The different schools of medicine bid back and forward for three months. Surgery making snide comments about oncology and optimism. Bidding life. Oncology making snide comments about surgery and reality. Bidding death.

  Alive again. Dead again. Alive again. Christ didn’t have this stamina for death and resurrection. Neither does Dad. He tires to the point where he doesn’t care.

  The oncologist makes his final bid. Death, of course. Quickly. The surgeon wets his scalpel in exploration … and is silent. Any more bids? Not a twitch. Humiliated again. Losing bidder, again.

  Passages choke off. Tubes go in. His nerves give up doing all the tricks nerves can do apart from pain. They do pain. We do morphine. And my father’s world shrinks to a bed and an hour-wide window of coherence a day.

  My last visit is during one of these windows of coherence. At least I hope like hell it was a window of coherence. A teeth-grit moment of lucidity. Something like that. Some brave mood out beyond the pain and the drugs. I hope so.

  He does the return journey to Hannah in an urn Mum carries nestled in her lap as hand luggage.

  She places the urn on a forty-four gallon drum in the middle of our backyard. We surround it with bathtubs full of ice and beer. She’s drunk by about ten in the morning and wandering around with a gin in one hand spraying water on the cut flowers, though mostly they’re everlasting daisies that become soggy and wilt with water. The others weigh down under the climbing sun. Only the Sturt’s Desert Pea shows any floral resolve. There’s a steeplechase of wire-link fences running to right and left cutting identical backyards off from each other and we step over into other gardens replenishing our flower supply when we need to. The neighbours don’t mind. They smile and wave for us to take more … grab the hydrangeas, too … take the camellias.

  My mother keeps repeating herself. ‘For Jesus’ sake don’t let anyone stay sober and dry-eyed here today, Adrian. Don’t leave ’em sober. Hear that, Jack? You get ’em all drunk and crying for your dad. Not that the sober wouldn’t cry over Frank. The sober would. In rivers. But you fill ’em up uncontrollable. Case they think they have to be strong. I don’t want this thing staying in hand.’ She has a mind to see just what sort of cyclone Dad’s absence can run through his assembled drunk friends. Or a fear of what won’t run through them sober.

  “When she’s not staring at me outright slit-eyed she keeps me in her peripheral vision. Wants me to know I’m watched. Wants me to know I’m a known quantity.

  An hour later I stand on a chair and propose a toast to the hundred strong mix of his friends and Mum’s friends and Adrian and my friends. I tell the story about how he was going to tie us up and make us drink red cordial if he got through it, we who were bastards enough to drink cold beer in his ailing, unswallowing presence.

  Well, as you know, he never got to force that red cordial on us. But I’d like to drink a glass of it anyway, in his honour. In honour of him and how happily I’d have drunk it to see him back well and on the beer and on life in general. And what a fucking pity it was he didn’t get to make us drink it. I’d have drunk it gladly.

  I raise a glass of red cordial I’ve made beforehand for the toast. Raise it above my head, sparkling, then not sparkling, in the dapple laid down by our two ghost gums that haunt his wake. ‘To Dad,’ I shout. ‘And maybe he really is here making me drink this red cordial.’ And I drink it fast.

  ‘Get me one, Jack,’ shouts Lucky Johnson. ‘I’ll have one myself.’ So will Porous Gates. And people start to drink red cordial as a symbol of what they would have done for the old man, the sacrifices they would have made. All those bottles of beer sit deep in the thawing ice.

  But then we have the conflict that while red cordial pays tribute to the deceased, continued sobriety would be a deep insult to him. The conflict is resolved by Porous Gates’ decision to use vodka instead of water to cut his cordial. More vodka is sent for. More cordial.

  Soon all the men and half the women are drinking tumblers of vodka with a dash of Schweppes raspberry cordial. The weight of the sun on top of this hard grain spirit with its dash of raspberry masking its venom soon has Dad’s wake staggering drunk. Those who loved him best are drunkest of all.

  Adrian supports himself with his hands on the top bar of the fence and begins to vomit over it into little Mark Renwick’s wading pool. A pink slick forms. Mrs Renwick, red cordial in hand, is patting him on the back saying, ‘There, there, Aids. Don’t worry about it. Grief is still grief, no matter how you express it. Vomit or tears, it’s still grief Those who loved him least are most horrified of all. Mrs Renwick takes Adrian under an arm and escorts him into our house, telling him grief is an intoxicant all of its own.

  Porous tells us this reminds him of the time in the Hannah early days. Before women. When the chiller went out in the wet mess on Anzac Day. ‘Sixty-three or four, can’t remember which,’ he says.

  ‘Four,’ Lucky tells him. ‘Nineteen-sixty-four.’

  ‘A hundred and ten in the waterbag and all the usual beer drinkers going for spirits with a hard Lest-We-Forget reverence. A reverence like now.’ He looks around at the wake. All the glasses of red swaying in and out of sun and shade, flashing on and off like Christmas lights. ‘Shit. I love to see beer drinkers drinking off the top shelf in heat like this. It’s like a re-enactment of something historical. We should all be in armour and chainmail hanging onto broadswords.’

  He’s truly happy for the old man. His wake an Agin-court or Hastings. And he’s right. Soon the bodies are starting to sprawl. We drag them into the shade as they drop.

  Lucky says the only way to get a vodka vomit out of a swimming pool is to burn it out. Only way known. He leans over the fence and pours what he thinks is two-stroke fuel, because he rummaged it out of our mower shed, into the pool. He throws a match in and the whole pool vibrates with a thump of invisible flame. We watch as Mark Renwick’s yellow inflatable duck called Rose blisters to brown and black and lowers its head slowly into the water. Then the pool walls melt and deflate and the flaming water and the blackening duck flow out across a short stretch of dead lawn into the Renwick’s compost heap which comes alive under a coat of blue and yellow flame and smoke that is thick and impressive. Rose is a bubbling splash of black petro by-product at the foot of the smouldering compost.

  Mark Renwick, four, is standing in the open back door of their house shouting, ‘Hey, Mister Johnson. Hey.’ His mother, red cordial in hand, is massaging small circles into Lucky’s back, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, Lucky. Grief is grief no matter how you express it. Tears or vandalism, it’s still grief.’

  Mark Renwick starts on a marathon bawl and gets bottom-spanked by his mother for being what she calls an insensitive little arsehole and interrupting what she calls a significant religious ceremony. His grief she locks in his bedroom.

  The rest of the wake is through a hang of compost smoke. A smoulder of orange peel on the air. Porous is happy about it. Saying the smoke certainly adds to his battle re-enactment theory.

  Lucky is bewildered and saying two-stroke shouldn’t just go ‘woof like that. Throwing his arms up in flame-burst. Repeating it over and over.

  I’m talking with Francis Beecher and Tony Smith who I went through school with and who Dad coached in every football team they starred in since puberty. They’re deep into
the hard red cordial. They’ve each cried and cheered up half a dozen times. Each time they cry they come to me and pat me on the back like he was my achievement. They’re currently cheered up, and humorous.

  Francis says the strong whisper is that the old man didn’t do it himself. Whisper is that it might have been me who knocked the old man. Whisper is, in fact, that I’ve scored the first leg of the Oedipal quinella. I poker face. Not knowing the protocol, the what to tell, the what to admit.

  ‘You remember Oedipus,’ he says. ‘We did him in fourth form to get out of King Fucking Lear.’

  I nod. Giving away nothing to their inappropriate ear-to-ear grins.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘Me and Tony were thinking if you had any plans to go for the second leg of that quinella, now might be the ideal time. What with your mother legless and in need of sympathy and affection … and single all of a sudden …’

  I leave them hanging in the long silence where they don’t know if their risky and probably offensive joke has worked … or not. I wait pokerfaced. My eyes glancing from one to the other. Maybe anger behind them. Maybe hate.

  Then I break into a smile and free them to laugh, and they laugh small and relieved at first and then big and leant back at their waists because they think they’re hilarious.

  ‘The Oedipal Quinella,’ I say. ‘You sick bastards. You blasfuckingphemers. As if I’d be into such skullduggery. I will however, as new head of the family, accept offers on her if she turns either of you two on,’ I tell them.

  They laugh again and I get away with ignoring their accusation about the first leg of that quinella. About Dad’s death. Which was probably why they made the joke up in the first place. To get my response to that accusation without making the accusation the big part of any statement.

  In the end all the stories of Dad are told. I break away from the remaining mourners and go and sit up against the Van Egmonds fence in a deckchair that was borrowed for the older type mourners to mourn in who are now gone home and mourning in front of their televisions at the nightly news and at the current affairs shows hosted by people with state-of-the-art hair and state-of-the-art teeth.

  My mother is holding his urn hugged right up under her chin now. With it and a glass of gin clinking at each other as she staggers over and joins one circle of mourners and then breaks away from it when she finds it’s talking politics and staggers over to another circle of mourners and breaks away from it when she finds it’s talking orbital engines and staggers over to the third circle of mourners and breaks away from it when she finds it’s talking iron-ore. And staggers past me and clutches his urn even tighter and gives me a fierce glare that may or may not be hiss-accompanied but that sets hiss going off in my mind anyway.

  And sets me thinking what she has in her urn is a fiction. A memory edited to huge distortion by her longing to have got their lives together right. A memory that adds up to flawless love and flawless harmony and all the other flawlesses the Bible and the romantic poets said a man and woman could be. I understand her need. Everyone who visits a grave edits the fife interred there. Never a dead man rose up out of his urn or his grave and yelled, ‘Bullshit. Bullshit. Remember how I broke three of your ribs when you swung at me with a broom because I turned up late and drunk for Adrian’s tenth birthday? Remember that?’

  When they organised his wake they never said it was anything but paying respects. Never said it was anything but celebrating his life. Never said it was anything but giving him the send-off he deserved. Never said it was another thing altogether. That it wouldn’t be just paying repects and it wouldn’t be just celebrating his life and it wouldn’t be just giving him the send-off he deserves … that we’d be bringing out the last of him that’s left alive and killing it off, too. That we’d be standing up with our beautiful memories of him alongside all his other friends and their beautiful memories of him and all his other loved ones their beautiful memories of him and using those memories up. That we’d be talking those memories out at each other and telling those memories to ourselves and toasting those memories and letting them do to us what they do to us and even as they do it knowing they won’t be able to do it again because memories are stories and stories are never as powerful on second telling. They never said, the organisers of his wake, that we’d be standing around killing him more. He’s dead now, though. Killed.

  I sit in the deckchair and watch them get animated about the export potential of orbital engines and about the death of the Labour movement and about iron being a finite resource. The sun is setting and the whole backyard is under a still blanket of compost smoke. A battleground with only one casualty.

  WHITE NOISE

  MELANIE’S DEMEANOUR has cracked apart and she’s crying hard. She tries for noiseless grief, but the sobs well up too urgent. People all around us are starting to stare. Some of them are crying, too. But just crying. Honourably wet eyes on poker-faces. I can see they’re strong in their admiration of Mel. How culturally deep must a woman be to spill grief with this gush at the opera? What sort of high-ranking arts-guru do you have to be to get this torn by the futile soprano waves Desdemona is mounting in her defence?

  This is what they ask themselves. And they don’t know who to watch, Desdemona or Mel. But they ask the question not suspecting the answer. If they knew the reality of her tears they’d want them cried elsewhere.

  Melanie carries real people’s grief. Her tears are not for the purple and gold robed woman uselessly singing her fidelity on this stage. She’s crying for the molested, addicted, diseased girl in stretch-denim and needle tracks she’s spent the day counselling. Desdemona may have tripped their release, but Dinah from Sunshine is who the tears are about.

  Dinah’s brother has just pleaded guilty to incest, and her family has shunned her. She’s twenty. Her life started low and has gone downhill uninterrupted. She walked out of school into a heroin habit, and started walking the streets to maintain it.

  It started with her brother when she was seven and he was twelve and he would make her bath while he watched. Within two years he wasn’t a watcher, and the whole secret adult world was being perpetrated after their parents had kissed her good night. At ten she had cystitis. Two years later she had herpes and was prescribed anti-depressants by the family doctor. At fourteen she and her brother were diagnosed with genital warts. In front of the family doctor Dinah’s mother drew herself up, showed proud shock, and told them to stop sharing bath towels. Some time later she asked Dinah if there was anything she really, really had to tell her. Asked like she was standing at a cliff edge asking, ‘Is there any reason you really, really have to push me?’

  And now Dinah’s in the Prince Alfred with full-blown AIDS running chaos into her organs. And she’s in our night at the opera. Melanie gave me the whole story as she was putting on the pearls and I was knotting the double-Windsor.

  She’s overcome by the story. As Othello draws up into his vision of loss, reaching with his wretchedness into the far stalls, I take hold of Mel’s arm and make her stand. We begin sidling down our row of seats, dodging feet, brushing knees, avoiding eyes. I see the people who had looked on her with admiration now shoot her angry glances. Us leaving early means they’ve been duped. No committed opera patron leaves before the ritual homage is paid. Her tears are probably nothing more than the death of a pet.

  A week later I feel the full depth of Mel’s distraction. It’s the first Wednesday in the month, so we attend our World Wildlife Fund meeting. It’s held in a large room upstairs in the Royal Mail in South Melbourne. These people are as serious as the opera people, with a righteousness the opera people used to have. Some of our members can rattle off the names of the last fifty species to become extinct — in order of disappearance. A few can do it in soulful voices, using zoological Latin. And though there’s over a hundred of us here, only a few of us drink. An air of probity hangs. Some of our members believe we can resurrect species with personal sobriety. My pot of beer is a blasphemy against the bandic
oot and the sloth. But I get drunk and love them for their good intentions. Then I out-donate them all. Gun them down in a beery flourish of cheque book they despise. Tonight it is the Baiji dolphin. The Baiji is a star attraction that has a Chinese flown in to represent it. The room is full. When Professor Zhou takes to the podium there is quiet. With tears and an interpreter he tells the story of the Baiji. The saddest story I’ve heard.

  The Baiji is a dolphin that lives in the Yangtze River in China and, as the river has become blindingly muddy through the millennia, its eyesight has atrophied and been replaced by acute hearing. By echolocation — letting go soft clicks and listening for their echo. The Baiji’s echolocation is accurate enough to find a minnow in weed on the river bed. They communicate with a series of whistles.

  They did, anyway, until humans invented the engine and made the Yangtze into a blaring traffic-jam of barges, container ships, ferries, liners and steamers.

  Water is a powerful transmitter of sound. And now, if you listen under the surface of the Yangtze you hear an amalgamated roar of engine. The cacophonous blend of every ship for miles. An endless scream of blinding white noise.

  Professor Zhou has a ghetto-blaster by the podium. He sets it between stations in the highest static beam he can find and gives us full volume. I gulp my beer. In the electric blare he stares at us, nodding.

  Melanie looks up in fright to see where the noise is coming from. She’s been miles away, staring into her lap, grinding her teeth, jaw muscles flexing pain for Lillian Green. Lillian is in at the Peter Mac with breast cancer down in her lungs drowning her. Not wanting to know if she’ll get to heaven — wanting to know if she’ll get home to use the Jiff on the bath again, where the sweat of little Otto’s kindergarten wrestles has distilled into that greasy ring around the white porcelain. Knowing that ring will return. Seeing its promise to need erasing again and again.