No one had shouted that when the trees fell on the mountain, there was just a whine of chainsaw, moaning wood, a leafy crash and thud. Some protestors had hugged the fallen trunks, and later planted RIP signs beside the stacked, limbed branches, as if the tree deaths were as real as any human’s. Meg thought this was superpathetic. Some people, she thinks, cannot achieve sfumato. Their lives are too narrow, like the girls at school who’d not understood one thing she’d told them about Pip. That she was supposed to be her donor, that they would take some part of her own blood and put it inside her sister’s body to make her better. There had been no transplant in the end, because of transformation. What’s that? the girls had asked, and Meg, very tired that day, and not even fully understanding herself, had said to the girls, it’s embarrassing how stupid you are, you better go Google.
Sometimes Comet and Bowie stayed overnight, chained to the Clear Energy gates, and Tess and Meg cycled up with breakfast made by their mother. Poached-egg sandwiches on sourdough chia, still warm in brown-paper wrapping. When the girls approached, those boys looked like two cocoons in their green sleeping bags. Just Bowie’s long brown dreads sticking out and their white twists of breath. This was peaceful protest – so quiet you could do it in your sleep. By refusing to move they’d halted the fracking, sometimes for a whole day. Their mother said, you girls have helped, you’ve kept their energy up! So they couldn’t bring themselves to tell her, Those boys are vegan – and that they’d frisbeed the eggs right on to the road. Seeing their mother’s meticulous cooking on the bitumen had made Meg more unhappy than any fallen trees, than any wildlife drowning in the holding ponds, but being sad about wasted eggs magnified her shame and for a time she stopped going out there. It had been something to do, in that year after Pip.
Now there are twenty active wells on the mountain, topped by towering metal rigs, and five ponds of chemical waste. Meg had passed those unfenced ponds when she cycled up to the gates. Rectangular sheets of brackish water with white, salt-crusted rims. The chemical ponds kill frogs and birds. Kangaroos get trapped by the steep-sided banks, and lie in the water, their fur seeped in mud and toxic run-off, and it’s disturbing to see them, beached there like inland seals. When it’s roos, Helen Tarkoff comes in her WIRES ute. She flings sacks over the animals to stop their struggling, then gives them a needle so their legs buckle beneath them.
Kent Waddington, the site manager, is gliding up the crane now. You can’t tell if he’s calm because the megaphone bounces his voice around the mountains.
A bit much! shouts Marjorie. Only three protestors today, it’s not like they’re deaf!
Meg does not say that Tucker is half-deaf from the many infections he’d had as a child. Untreated, her mother had told them, except for Hodgins’s poultices.
Did you hear? Marjorie turns back to Meg. Someone tried to run those boys off the road the other night. Someone’s regularly tailgating the protestors.
Meg takes a second sandwich, then another, muffling her mouth with bread. She thinks of the wreck on their property, which had come off the Lower Mountain Road, said her father. An accident, he’d said, though later she’d heard Nora ask how anyone could be sure.
Bowie, Comet and Tucker start chanting, Respect existence, or expect resistance! from their tripods, and Meg wonders why everyone calls them boys while the Clear Energy workers are called men, even though they’re all about the same age, some with beards and tattooed arms, and she wonders if it’s a love for the earth and a willingness to climb up there and defend it like circus artists on stilts that makes you more boy than man. Or maybe it’s because the boys don’t wear high-viz vests with company logos. Yet Meg knows her father loves the land and, still, he’s had the Clear Energy men out to the farm because he wants to get both sides of the story, he says. He’s weighing up whether to let them do exploration on the north side of the property.
Meg gulps the last of her bread. The air is drier now the mist has risen, and the cranes and the men are stark paper shapes against the sky. Meg prefers the dawn smokiness that breaks up the lines between all things and Marjorie’s saying under the small shouts of the men, That boy does not seem well to me, he’s got the shakes, Thomas Tucker, have you noticed?
10
Once he’d got notice of his position at the River Primary, eight hours north of Sydney, Jim had farewelled his city friends over dinner at various houses. Homes these friends actually owned, could you believe it; no he really couldn’t with his mouldy, wallpapered rental and lack of appliances.
Drunken tales unspooled at these meals about Jim’s heading north, about what he was about to become Up There. A bumbling Greenie in Rasta beanie and Jesus boots, extolling soy-chai enemas. Which nostril would he pierce, the friends asked, on which flank would he get his Pentacle of Venus tattoo? Jim did his best baleful as he listened, while Michiko stirred her roux and Yusef skewered prawns. But this kind of talk only fired his decision to leave. Their weary superior mythology, the cosy assumption, the settling in – or settling for – city life seemed to him a kind of blindness.
Greta, breastfeeding her youngest, was especially worried about where Jim would live. She’d downloaded some photos of Bidgalong properties, which looked, printed in low-res black and white, much more foreboding than they had online. The trees and mountain backdrops loomed, so the houses seemed enshrouded by the very nature you were meant to be gobsmacked by.
But anyway, he actually liked being homeless, he’d say at someone’s inner-city terrace or semi, homes that already looked post-apocalyptic: their roofs covered in plastic sheeting during the rebuild, the kitchens with wiring snaking from the demolished walls, the taped-up, resurfaced bathrooms with their heady VOCs, the muddy yards covered in tarp, and scarred by tree removals. All his friends were waiting for the rain to abate so they could finish the build. Every second house had a skip out front into which the homes appeared to have puked their incompatible contents: rusty wrought iron, old bricks, rotten plasterboard, buckled lead-light, broken flyscreens, illegally removed asbestos, excess Gyprock and last year’s IKEA creations. The more covetable fixtures hovered in cyberspace – French doors, cedar-framed sash windows, decorative gables – entire deconstructed homes, up for auction.
He’d make his homeless comment and the friends who’d been burrowing so doggedly into their heritage fixer-uppers would jibe: You? Homeless – on Daddy’s trust fund? But he’d not touched a cent of any family money. Sylvie would say that Jim lived as if always on the verge of leaving, his furniture scrounged from Potts Point footpaths and charity shops, things chosen without the slightest eye for vintage cool, things from the eighties for God’s sake with zero aesthetic appeal. Moulded-plastic tables, an ugly mustard-coloured pouf, milk crates full of records for which he had no turntable. His fridge with its nude cheese, deliquescing cucumbers and instant pasta sauces growing new green hair. When he removed certain items, he’d sniff, then shake to redistribute any offending ingredient. Her Surry Hills garden flat was artful, luxurious, dustless. It was decorated with objects from lunch-break online shopping jags. A porcelain light fitting, an alpaca throw, wraps, shrugs, cuffs, shifts. His lack of commitment to things suggested he might be the same about people, she said. His cracked plastic Tupperware with its curry stains. His jam-jar toothbrush holder. The bed of scavenged wooden pallets. It was brutalist – no – she’d correct herself – just brutal.
Sylvie never came to Jim’s friends’ dinners. During their five years together the friends had not really taken to Sylvie, or she to them. They asked after each other in a vague, dutiful way. Sylvie had barely any close girlfriends, she’d always had a man, she said; and with her long working days, that was plenty.
After the jokes and the global cuisine had grown swampy, Jim would cab home in the persistent drizzle. It had rained and rained that final Sydney winter. The friends stayed inside playing Rorschach games with the mould on their new extensions. Only the parents among them were forced out, following restive toddle
rs across sodden parks. They staggered through mud in rainproof jumpsuits, gumboots and hoods like undernourished visitors from some intergalactic zone. They all had persistent coughs. Their kids had weals, rashes, wheezes and chronic asthma, their noses were permanently lacquered with snot, and just as the kids were up and well again they’d vomit, matter-of-factly, on to someone’s shoulder, and a new virus would do the rounds so that when he rang Kate, or Geoff, they’d say, Little Olivia has caught Beatrice Mead’s Slapped Cheek! as if they’d had the provenance checked in a lab.
Sometimes the women turned to him – Greta or Jane – smeared with Vegemite, teary with exhaustion and undisguised envy and said, I don’t recognise the person I’ve become! It was impossible to prepare for children. Jim thought the acts required to parent were mythic; and seemed more noble than any of the unfinished projects in the half-life he was living. Then he’d make himself remember Geoff wearing baby-puke to the pub dinner, Andrew and Jane who hadn’t had sex since the kid had colonised their bed, Greta with her mysterious birth injuries.
And Sylvie had broken it off after she found out about the baby, or foetus or whatever you were meant to call it. And Jim had let her because he hadn’t dared say, let’s make a go of it – a kid, a house, a family, what the hell, why not? He floated through his life, she said, one week after the procedure, on her couch with unwashed hair, wearing track pants and a desolate look. She was still feeling sick from the hormones, and would disappear to vomit and return with a flannel pressed to her face. You’re stuck. You can’t even see it. Piss off.
She’d made the decision about the abortion, it wasn’t his pain to feel. But he’d allowed himself brief fantasies of himself as a father, of a small hand inside his. And for weeks after he’d left the clinic, the faint impression of footsteps shadowed him. How could he have said he wanted the baby more than anything then, he just hadn’t wanted her?
Back then, as his friends became fathers and he visited them in the busy wards, watching them bathe their infants more devoutly than he’d seen them do anything else in their lives, a painful longing for family had stolen up. As if a child could return him to what he’d lost, animating some genetic thread; perhaps even lead the way back to himself. He’d told no one about this feeling, which seemed unmanly, mildly shameful – he’d never thought genetic connections important. He’d imagined adopting, or fostering, unfazed by blood links, biology. Try as he might he could not deny their appeal, these babies, so rapidly absorbed into lore, their presence creating the family, a thing he longed to restore, but could not, or would not with Sylvie.
After five years together it wasn’t the first time they’d broken up. But by moving to Bidgalong, Jim had made sure it was the last.
On their final date in the harbour-side restaurant Sylvie got speedily drunk on dirty martinis. She ran her hand down the menu with eyes closed, and opened them on five sea textures and a celery-heart salad. When he looked at her frankly he remembered the roots of his attraction, how some frightened kid shimmered up behind all that posing, how her sensuousness was bound right up in need. Behind her, through a massive window, the ocean, seagulls passing, a chain of cars crossing the Harbour Bridge. A parade of tourist brides, stuffing their white skirts into limousines along the quay. Further south they’d pose for wedding shots beneath a bridge pylon. Say Cheese! Chiizu! Kimchi! Patata! Pepsi! Ouisttiti! Käsekuchen! The tuxedoed men beside them, drowned by tulle and chiffon. Was this what she wanted?
Sylvie examined her naked hand, adjusted the thin strap of her dress where it lay over a sharp collarbone. She was six weeks pregnant. By the time the oloroso caramel arrived, they’d decided. But – she was drinking heavily, hadn’t he noticed? She’d made her mind up already. He’d take her to the clinic in two weeks, after that it was over. The pregnancy was all that bound them. Ending it would extinguish their connection. But, he said, quietly horrified, there is memory. And she turned, very grave, liquid-eyed. Do you think remembering me made my mother and me any closer? I’m only doing what she should have, thirty-two years ago.
She rode off on a ferry, her pale face a small full stop. Jim walked beneath the train line and stood on the kerb. At Circular Quay the taxi drivers pulling up chose you. The buses waited for no one. He thought about getting a motorbike and driving recklessly north or south, about becoming anonymous in some other place. He thought of his mother, gone before she was gone. Drifting on OxyNorm and Sublimaze while he read aloud to her. In her last months at home, she’d become very keen on Hemingway. She needed his clipped manliness, she said; all that austere coldness made her feel she could cope with her pain. Jim read the birth scene from ‘Indian Camp’: the native woman labouring without anaesthetic, Nick’s father attending and deaf to her cries of pain because – as he tells his son – they are of little consequence. Jim had read aloud while his father sat in the kitchen with the Fin Review, putting his head around the door every so often, it seemed to Jim, for Veronica’s permission to continue his life downstairs.
One month after the abortion Sylvie came to the airport in a shiny car that wasn’t hers. She smelt of leather – upholstery? aftershave? – and was doing her best to seem jaunty, but was breathless, high-coloured. Her mascara was smudged, a stray pin abseiled from her hair. Jim remembered her late-night calls, early in their relationship, when she’d said she just needed to hear him breathing down the line.
She sipped Pellegrino at the airport café, sallow-faced, puffy, still recovering perhaps from the pregnancy. The problem of what to call it – their child, embryo, incipient being – seemed to grow in Jim’s mind. Outside the nondescript clinic he’d passed the religious fanatics. On their illustrated sandwich boards, tiny hands, bodies floating inside their mothers’ atmospheres. Jim had deliberately shouldered one man then stared at his slogan: Your mother gave you the gift of life, pass it on. He realised then how Veronica really would disappear once his memories of her were gone. This baby, who’d hardly seemed to exist at all, had already utterly changed him.
Sylvie, watching the planes, could hardly look at Jim. Why had she even come?
Jim felt murderous and grateful – he was leaving. Through the huge window, an Airbus climbed the sky.
He took her cool, thin hand, but she was way off, jaw tight.
You get to escape, she said finally, turning, her right eye quivering. To clean air and mountains, rivers that you can probably even drink from.
Now, in Bidgalong, eight postcards stacked on his desk. In each, Sylvie’s clipped sentences track a new phase of their separation: anger, regret, remorse and spite. Today’s card: gnomic. He has, writes Sylvie, no idea what he’s lost and what he’s left behind. Her words insinuate themselves within his evening’s mantra, as he sits on his broken porch and tries zoning out, tries not to turn towards farm or mountain. The air is balmy, scented with mint. The clouds are shredded along a carmine horizon. He’s so utterly shit at meditation, he realises, because his focus is only repression; it is no letting go. And what leaks out tonight, between each attentive breath, is Sylvie’s plaintive voice from postcard number four, her something about the baby we need to discuss.
11
You could think of the weather, said Tess’s teacher in yesterday’s class, as a gateway between the earth and sky. So Tess is giving it more attention, gauging the atmosphere for pressures and risings, collecting cups of sooty rain, scouting the escarpment for shreds of fog. Today one cloud, thick and striated like a skinned shank in a medical book. In the morning, mist, rolling down Fox’s Lane like stealthy mountain spooks. In the quiet lounge, curled on the sofa, she opens her notebook, scrapes her fringe sideways, yawns.
In class they’d listed words for winter climate. Raw, nippy, dirty, thundery, chilly, foggy, foul and sharp. Mr Parker had written them up, then turned to Tess. He no longer addressed her directly but waited, with a lifted brow, in case she decided to speak. At lunch he took her aside.
If she didn’t feel able to talk in class, she must at least keep
a journal, he said. Or risk failing.
Tess had shrugged, then boredly scanned the walls and ceilings.
So, he continued gently, what would a person write in such a book? Since our subject is Landscape and Identity, I want you to write about your particular weather. How is it connected to your family? How is the atmosphere part of who you are?
Tess had looked around at the posters. The British Turners, and the intricate landscapes of Petyarre, Napangardi and Kngwarreye they’d discussed for Conceptions of Land. Bugs, stick insects and butterflies motionless in jars by the window. Last week they’d watched Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, an enormous sodium yellow sun, rising inside a London hall. Pale English people lay on the floor, glorying in the light, as if they’d never seen sun before.
We can’t exactly avoid the climate, can we? Mr Parker said. When it’s unpleasant, when it’s raw, dirty and clammy, how do we get through?
A cold tremor passed through her. She stared at her feet with her mouth slightly open, forgetting to breathe or swallow. She knew he wasn’t talking about weather. She jammed a finger in her dark hair and wound it. She began to kick the leg of a nearby chair, unwittingly, over and over. How could her teacher know her mind, and what her thoughts were running from?
All those people entranced by Eliasson’s fake sun reminded Tess of how she’d once calmed her sister during the long drive home from St Catherine’s. In the backseat Meg was slicked with sweat; she’d already vomited twice by the roadside and was chewing Bach flower lozenges. Her damp hands trembled in her lap. On her arm, a tiny bruise from the last time they’d taken her blood. Tess leaned over then and wiped a circle of fog from her sister’s window. Look Meg, she said – and as the world outside appeared, a frosted cameo under her hand, the sisters remembered, for one second, how it was to marvel.
That was the day their parents told Pip’s doctors they did not want a technological death. Not long after, the social worker visited. She politely surveyed the kitchen, the bedrooms, the study.
The World Without Us Page 7
