1988

by Andrew McGahan

  I cooked. I carved a couple of potatoes into chips. The steaks went into the pan. The peas into the pot. It all bubbled away. Wayne came back, got himself another beer from the fridge.

  ‘How’d the weather go?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine. That operator in Darwin sounds like a very strong woman.’

  ‘The operator?’

  ‘Tough. You can here it in her voice.’

  ‘How do you like your steak?’

  ‘Rare.’

  Dinner was served on the table in the schoolroom. We moved our two chairs in from the verandah and sat there under the fluorescent lighting. Naked floorboards extended off to either end of the room. On the table there were two knives and forks. A bottle of tomato sauce. Salt and pepper. It was a dining room for working men.

  I didn’t feel like a working man. The steak was dry and the chips were soggy and the weather barely qualified as a job. After we’d finished, Wayne cleared the plates away and actually began washing-up. I took my beer and wandered out onto the front verandah. I looked across the compound to Vince’s house. It was brightly lit, but there was no sign of him. I pictured him on his stool, upright, glass in hand. Did he expect us to return the dinner invitation? Did he expect any contact with us at all?

  I remained on the front steps for a while, but there was nothing to see. I went back through the house, took the chairs to the back verandah and sat. Nothing there either. Wayne finished with the washing-up and joined me. We looked out at the blackness. Time passed slowly. Life without television.

  In the end I resorted to the bourbon, and Wayne got himself stoned. We drank and smoked and talked from time to time. At eight-forty I took my glass of bourbon, and the torch, and stepped out for the nine p.m. observation.

  I was drunk by this stage. I peered at all the meters and gauges, then staggered around gazing for the clouds. The sky was utterly black, so I wrote down eight-eighths of heavy cover. I began the encoding and finished it at four minutes to nine. I sat there waiting. The radio buzzed and sang. The fan swirled. I put my head behind my hands and stared at the ceiling.

  I studied the spider webs in the corners. They were wispy, dirty things. I realised that the spiders in them were redbacks. Big, fat ones. I counted seven, just doing a quick sweep. I grew alarmed. I looked under the chair and under the desk. There were webs, but no spiders visible. I would have to be careful.

  I also noticed, under the desk, several piles of old magazines. I pulled them out. They were mainly People and Post. I checked the dates. They were all over six months old. I flicked through a People, checking out the naked women. Breasts everywhere, some of them bigger than weather balloons. I dumped the pile. There were over a hundred issues there. They’d keep.

  At nine the operator was on the air. I listened as she went through the list, picking up the names of the other weather stations. I heard Meningrida. Jabiru. Murgenella. The names meant nothing. I’d need a map. Wayne was right though, the operator sounded very much in control. A million square kilometres of air space, and it was all her territory. For most of the stations she greeted the weather observers by name. A matriarch. I imagined her as large, hard-bitten, dragging on a cigarette. Then the call Victor Lima Nine Charlie Uniform Cape Don came through. I answered and was heard. I read out my list of numbers, then I made my way back to the house. I was free until six a.m.

  Wayne was still on the back verandah.

  ‘We’re gonna have to get some better chairs,’ he said, ‘These are terrible.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘What games did you bring?’

  ‘Scrabble and cards.’

  He thought, shook his head. ‘I’m not that bored yet.’

  ‘How long do you think it’ll take?’

  We sat there until about eleven, drinking slowly, then called it quits. I went to my room and sat at the desk. I looked down at myself in the mirror. I got up and went through the pile of books I’d brought. Nothing looked interesting. I undressed, switched off the light and lay on the bed. The house was already growing familiar. I didn’t think of ghosts or past residents. I switched the light on. I found the alarm clock and set it. Five-forty a.m.

  FIFTEEN

  The days passed. We settled into the three-hourly routine of the weather. It looked like being an easy enough life. The only chores were the early morning observations. Whoever had the 3 a.m. could easily stay awake for it, but the 6 and the 9 needed the alarm clocks. The ones we’d bought were the old-fashioned style—wind-up, with big bells on the top. It was an ugly sound to wake to, but that was the nature of timekeeping.

  The weather itself varied. The first couple of days were mostly fine and hot. Then on Friday morning there were storms—huge Cb9s that rolled in off the sea with thunder and lightning and heavy rain. Thirty-three millimetres. It was loud on the iron roof. Water streamed through the gaps in the verandah ceiling. The ground sweated and steamed after the rain had passed, and within an hour everything was dry again. It was, we assumed, typical wet season weather. There was a old weather book in the shack with annual details on Cape Don conditions. The average March rainfall, it said, was just over 300 mm. That was fine with me. I liked rain.

  Friday afternoon, after the morning storms were gone, the supply plane arrived. It did the low circle of the compound to identify itself, then flew off towards the airstrip. Vince picked up Wayne and I, and the three of us drove down along the track. The plane was waiting at the strip. It was the same one that had flown us over, with the same pilot. The cabin was jammed with grocery boxes. We were just the first on a long delivery run. We unloaded our boxes. The pilot gave Vince a small sack of mail and Conservation Commission correspondence. Vince handed over a wad of his letters, to be mailed back in Darwin. Then we drove home.

  Vince kept mostly to his house. He didn’t seem to do anything or go anywhere. The weather was our job now, and the lighthouse didn’t need him. Exactly what his duties towards the national park itself were, I didn’t know. What did a ranger do in a park that was Aboriginal land, and in which no visitors were allowed? We saw Kevin from time to time, and caught snatches of classical music on the breeze, but that was all.

  Wayne spent a few hours in his studio, playing around with the easels and putting some canvas on a frame, but he did no painting. I sat at my desk several times. I loaded ink into the pen, wrote a few words with it. It was curious, seeing my handwriting on paper again. I missed the computer keyboard. I thought about writing novels. I’d done it before, after all. This would be my third attempt. Still, I couldn’t seem to remember how it was done. Anyway, it felt too early to start. It would take a week or two. To get the feel of the place.

  I wandered around the compound. There was nothing to see, nowhere to go. There was nothing to get the feel of. Only the bush. I walked off into it, looking around. In a few minutes the lighthouse was out of sight. I was enveloped by dense trees and ferns and long grass. Swamps glistened. It had a dark, disturbing feel to it. Hot. Still. And I wasn’t a bushwalker, I wasn’t aware of what to look for, be wary of. If I walked half an hour deeper in I’d probably never get out again. ‘City boy starves within three hundred yards of own house.’ I walked back to the compound.

  On Sunday afternoon Vince came over and asked us if we wanted a look at the coast by boat. We said yes, as long as we were back in time for the next observation. We drove a short way down the track and took the one and only turn. It led down to a small bay. ‘Keep an eye out for crocs,’ Vince said, as we climbed out.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably not.’

  It was another overcast day. The water was grey and calm. The bay itself was roughly circular, opening northwards to the ocean. There was a narrow beach of sand where the track ended, but otherwise the bay was bound by mangroves and mudflats.

  ‘You’d be unlucky to strike one on the beach,’ Vince went on, ‘But it is their territory.’

  I took a long careful look. On the far side of the bay was the mo
uth of a creek. It wound its way back into the mangroves. It seemed very dark in there, a black tangle of branches and mud. No crocodiles though. We walked down towards the water’s edge. There was one boat, pulled up above the high tide line. It was an aluminium dinghy with an outboard motor. Back up on the beach there were fuel drums and other equipment. Vince pumped petrol into a smaller can, fuelled-up the outboard.

  ‘Is this going to be a patrol?’ I asked.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Anything.’

  We shoved the boat into the water. Wayne and I climbed in and Vince pushed us off. We drifted a few yards. The boat had a central console with a wheel and a throttle on it. Vince hit the starter button. The engine whined and turned. I noticed lifejackets piled in the stern. Should we be wearing them? I looked down. The water was very clear, the bottom of rippled sand. The outboard wasn’t starting.

  We waited. Vince gave up on the button, played around with the outboard itself. He tried again. It turned over, but it didn’t sound healthy and didn’t start. We bobbed gently up and down, going nowhere.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Vince.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘How should I know? I don’t know anything about boats.’

  He jumped out. The water was only knee-deep. He pulled the boat back to shore, and together we dragged it up the sand. Vince examined the outboard.

  ‘It’s stuffed,’ he said, eventually.

  ‘Can you fix it?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  We helped him disconnect it and load it into the back of the Toyota. Then we drove back towards the lighthouse. Vince smoked silently, staring through the windscreen.

  I said, ‘What else are you supposed to do here? If you don’t have a boat, I mean.’

  ‘Who knows. There’d be a management plan for the place somewhere, but I haven’t seen it.’

  We got back, unloaded the outboard into the workshed. Wayne and I returned to our house. There was nothing more to wait for, I decided. Assuming the boat wasn’t going anywhere for a while, we’d seen all of the Cobourg Peninsula that we were likely to see.

  But we waited anyway. We drank. Something about the atmosphere encouraged alcohol consumption. It was the heat, the fact that the beer seemed to sweat straight out of you, leaving you untouched, permanently thirsty. The hangovers weren’t severe, and the hayfever and asthma were behaving themselves.

  There was something, too, about the back verandah. We sat there for hours during the night, propped up on the kitchen chairs, listening to tapes, slotting can after can into the styrofoam coolers. We talked every now and then, but a lot of it was just sitting, looking at the stars. The rain came and went. At times there was lightning far out to sea. Wayne rolled joints. We watched the lighthouse beam sweep overhead.

  Every afternoon around four the power went off briefly, came on again. I finally worked out it was Vince changing over the generators. He showed me around the generator shed. There were three of them, large diesels, set in the concrete floor. One of them was in pieces. Another, according to Vince, was in bad need of an overhaul. Only the third was reliable. Vince had been on the radio to Darwin several times, demanding new parts. He’d been waiting for months. As it was, he ran the two functioning generators on twenty-four hour shifts and hoped for the best. It was, he said, typical of everything at Cape Don.

  We saw more of Kevin. He wandered into our house every now and then. Sniffed around. Lay at Wayne’s feet. Departed. Wayne pulled ticks from his back. Vince eventually told him not to bother. New ticks replaced the old ones, and the new ones bothered the dog more. Kevin himself did what he could. The ticks were in the grass, so whenever he crossed the compound he stuck carefully to the paths. He didn’t move fast, and even then he was only active in the evenings. Throughout the day he stayed under the ceiling fans and suffered. There was no suggestion that his real owner might ever return and collect him.

  We learned from the dog. Night was the time for movement.

  Finally Vince donated two of his lounge chairs to our cause. He said he didn’t use them himself anyway. He warned that we would have to return them though, if any official visitors arrived. His house was the ranger station, and the chairs were station furniture. We asked if the chance of visitors was likely. He said he doubted it. We set the chairs on the back verandah, and began to pass our evening sessions in comfort.

  SIXTEEN

  Twenty to six, Friday morning, our seventeenth day. I hit the button on the clock and stopped the alarm. The room was dim, the air cool under the ceiling fan. The French windows were open. I looked out, saw it was raining. I got up, pulled on shorts and shirt, went out into the hall. The house was quiet, the rain whispering. Unwashed plates sat on the table. I pissed in the toilet, slipped my thongs on, flapped down the hall again, out the front door.

  A grey world. Somewhere, perhaps, the sun was up. It occurred to me that a weather observer should know what time the sun rose and set. The phases of the moon. The tides. I would never be a true professional. I walked across the compound, raising my face to the rain. The sound of the generator was muted. Mists drifted below in the bush. I had the place to myself. Only two other people anywhere in the region, and both of them sleeping.

  I went through the weather. Temperature at 25.9 degrees, rainfall 28 mls in the last three hours. I worked through the encoding, then sat awaiting the call from Darwin. It was all standard stuff by now. I flicked through a People magazine, stared out the door. The static on the radio was heavy. At six the operator came through, but she couldn’t hear me in return. I was instructed to switch to another channel and did so. It didn’t help, I was talking to no one. The operator gave up on me and called the next station. I began writing a note to tell Wayne that he’d have to call in the 6 a.m. details when he got through at nine.

  I finally realised that there was nothing written in the 3 a.m. slot. The 3 a.m. was Wayne’s that morning. He hadn’t done it. It meant I had to correct some of my figures. For one thing, 28 mls had fallen in the last nine hours, not the last three. It was a bad one to skip, the 3 a.m. Not only because it left a long gap between the 9 p.m. and the 6 a.m., but because it paid the most. Fifteen dollars, compared to seven-fifty for a mid-afternoon slot.

  It was our first missed observation. One in over two weeks though, the Bureau could hardly complain. I stood in the doorway and watched the morning. I was no longer tired. That was the problem. You had to be up for only twenty minutes to do the weather, but it was long enough for the body to forget about going back to sleep. I walked through the rain to the house.

  I made toast. I sat on the verandah and watched the water drip from the roof. I felt good. Maybe it was true what some people said. Mornings weren’t so bad. Around eight I went back to bed and read. At twenty to nine I was still awake. I heard Wayne’s alarm start ringing. It clicked off. I waited. The minutes passed. His door didn’t open. Eventually I rose and knocked on his door.

  ‘Wayne? You getting up?’

  There were muffled sounds from inside. Then the door opened and he poked his head out, bleary-eyed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The 9 a.m. observation. You’ve only got about five minutes left.’

  He grunted, shuffled back inside. He came out dressed, then headed off towards the weather shack. I sat on the front steps. The rain had stopped. The day’s heat was building, steam drifting across the ground. After about fifteen minutes Wayne came back.

  I said, ‘How’d it go?’

  He still looked mostly asleep. His face and his arms were spotted, livid with sandfly bites. He didn’t have the skin for mangrove country. ‘It was fine.’

  ‘What happened to the 3 a.m.?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Did you set your alarm?’

  ‘I didn’t get up, that’s all. I was pretty stoned when I went to bed.’

  ‘You’ve gotta get up Wayne.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if we miss ju
st one.’

  ‘No, but what about the nine? You would’ve missed that too if I hadn’t been awake.’

  ‘Alright, I’ll make sure I get up next time.’

  ‘We only get paid for the ones we do.’

  ‘I know. Don’t panic.’

  He banged through the screen door and was gone. I sat there. The screen door banged open. ‘If you were so worried about it,’ Wayne said, ‘Why didn’t you just do the nine yourself?’

  ‘Because it’s not mine. It’s not my job to make sure you do yours.’

  ‘Okay, so if I miss one then I don’t get paid for it. It’s my loss.’

  ‘It’s not just the money. They won’t like it in Darwin if we start missing them every day.’

  ‘They won’t care.’

  ‘Yes they will.’

  ‘Well what d’you care? We’re not making a career out of this.’

  He was gone. I was glad. I had no reply to the question. Why did I care? It was only a job. It wasn’t the real reason we were there. In six months we’d be gone and it’d make no difference whether we’d done it well or not.

  Wayne came out again. ‘You know, you could’ve just made up the stuff for the 3 a.m. We can never reach Darwin on the radio then anyway—how are they to know if we actually got up for it or not? We could sleep right through the three and the six.’

  I looked at him. ‘We are not going to do it that way.’

  ‘Jesus, why are you so fucking responsible all of a sudden?’

  ‘Because one of us has to be.’

  He thought, went to say something, went away.

  I sat. That’d fixed him.

  Then I thought.

  It’d fixed me, too.

  SEVENTEEN

  It rained off and on for the next few days. Wayne and I were confined to the house. It was a big house though, and we managed to avoid each other. I sat at the desk long enough to write some letters. Otherwise I lay on the bed and read. I could hear Wayne in his studio, his stereo on high volume. As far as I knew, he hadn’t started painting. We didn’t mention the observations again, and Wayne didn’t miss any.